FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 6 Putting the Pieces in Place

The good news is that the crane has a life expectancy of twenty years or more, so it probably won’t be me who has to replace it!

Installing the new crane was a nerve-wracking experience for Steve and Tim, and for me, too. The crane weighed 63 tonnes, and it had to be manoeuvred out along the new jetty over the mud and water, and then turned 90 degrees – with less than two inches to spare – to get it safely lodged onto the metal tracks that it now runs along. That’s not an operation I’d like to repeat very often. The good news is that the crane has a life expectancy of twenty years or more, so it probably won’t be me who has to replace it! T oday, we use over 300,000 tonnes of asphalt a year, and it all comes from our own plant. When we started production in 2010, we were using about two-thirds of what we made for our own jobs, and selling on the rest. That proportion has gone up in recent years; we now use about three-quarters. But when we started production, I needed customers, and I was looking for customers who were like ourselves, or rather who were like what we used to be back in the 1970s: family companies that could do business on a handshake. We targeted about half a dozen companies like that, and David set credit limits for them. I remember him putting some names in front of me, Carole and Clive Jennings, with a credit limit of £20,000. I’d known the Jennings family for years: twenty grand wouldn’t last them a week. All they could do with that was buy from us for a week, and then go to Hanson or Tarmac or whoever else would give them credit. So, I went down and saw Carole and Clive. I told them I didn’t want to pry, but I’d like to help. And I sat down in their front room, and they gave me a cup of tea, and told me how they ran their business. They did the same that I used to do. They had a book with their spread rates, just like the ones my father gave me, and on a Friday afternoon –

The new 63-tonne crane safely up and running on its tracks at the end of the jetty.

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