FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Prologue

some people coming into the front room for a chat and a cup of tea. The front room was the office, and our home was the company headquarters. That was where I first learned about the business, listening to our main asphalt supplier, Dan Sullivan, who was just as likely to talk about greyhounds as about the business itself. The family business of those days seems a million miles away from the business that we are all part of today. But is it really? I had to grow up, and to learn to see things differently, because I was changing and the world was changing around me. And it was the same for the business. The business couldn’t stand still, any more than the world could stop turning. And in those early days, there was nothing to tell us that our business was going to survive. Many businesses don’t. Looking back over our history, my most vivid memory is of a certain day, nearly forty years ago, when I first experienced the full weight of responsibility for the business on my shoulders. I didn’t know then if either of us would survive. The year was 1976. I was twenty-one years old, and I’d been working in my father’s road mending business for a little over four years. I had trained as a plant fitter, and so I spent most of my time out on site, making sure the machines were working properly. When things were a bit quiet, I would spend time in the office, getting to grips with the paperwork.

In 2011, we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of our company. We didn’t go in for great celebrations at the time; we’re not that kind of company. We like to get on with things, and move forward. Our big celebration in that year was the opening of a landmark project: the new Erith Asphalt Plant and the Thames side Conway Wharf and Jetty. The importance of that project was not what we had achieved, it was what the new Plant would enable us to achieve in the future. Even on our 50 th Anniversary, we were looking forwards, not backwards. But there is a value in looking back at your own history, remembering where you came from, and reflecting on how you got to where you are today. F.M. Conway Ltd. is now a market-leading, cutting-edge company that employs well over a thousand people. It has offices and depots across London and the south east of England. It commissions and deploys state-of-the-art plant that is the envy of the industry. It is one of the fastest-growing and most profitable companies in any industry. But it wasn’t always like that. My early memories, and the memories of many of my colleagues, are of a completely different kind of world, and of a completely different kind of business. In those days, family life and business life were so closely woven together that they seemed inseparable. When I was a child at our first home in Penge, a business meeting meant

x