FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

But we had cash, and we had a plan, and it had been ten years since we moved into Rochester Way. What we needed now was land.

before they had their bottle of wine, or beer, or whatever – they would work out their income and their costs. They knew to a penny how much money they had made. So, I asked Clive if I could see one of their books. And he got it out, and there it was, all written out. ‘Job: The So-And-So Golf Club, sixty tonne of asphalt at the Hanson price, and at the end two hundred quid profit.’ That was good enough for me. So, I went back to David and told him to give them a credit limit of £100,000. He argued, but I told him it was an instruction: they would be good for it. And they’re still one of our best customers. T he Asphalt Plant gave us a secure supply of asphalt and added the finishing touch to our suite of recycling capabilities. But it also began to open my eyes to the significant advantages that we could gain from strategically located depots. And if ever there was a good time to be buying land, it was now. With the recession that had kicked off in 2008, people seemed to have stopped thinking about the future. They had nailed the portholes shut, and lost track of what they were trying to do. And that was driving land prices down. But we had cash, and we had a plan, and it had been ten years since we moved into Rochester Way. What we needed now was land. Not far away from the site at Erith, another site had become available at Mulberry Way. The site had been used as a chemical production facility by Henkel, so it was ideally set up for what we wanted: a research laboratory where we could develop new products for our Asphalt Plant. Although Mulberry Way was close to our Erith site as the crow flies, road access was not at all good. However, we happened to know that a new road was being planned which would practically join the two sites together (we knew because we had been

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