FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 4 Laying the Foundations

I hadn’t put it into words before, but I did now: self-delivery. It was the instinct behind my urge to own plant rather than hire it.

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nd it was at this time, as we all began to prepare for the New Millennium, that I began to see the way forward for our business. It wasn’t a bolt of lightning; it was something I had felt inside me from the earliest days, witnessing the problems that Dad had had at Angel Hill, trying to deal with the issues that I had had at Cathall Road, all the way through and up to the present moment. I hadn’t put it into words before, but I did now: self-delivery. It was the instinct behind my urge to own plant rather than hire it. It was the instinct behind my urge to control supplies of our material rather than be at the mercy of our suppliers. It was what we already did, what we were good at doing, and what we should focus on doing for the future. Customers came to us because they trusted us to do what we said we would do: what we offered our customers was honesty and hard work. It was as simple as that. We could do it. Our customers didn’t want us to farm their work out to other people. And why would we do that when we could do it better ourselves? So, that was what we should focus on: self-delivery. If there was a service that our customers wanted and that we weren’t able to deliver ourselves, we should take a long, hard look at it, and ask ourselves the question: can we do that? And I knew where we should start. One

The acquisition of Hawbury Cleansing was our first significant step towards self-delivery. From now on, we would develop all the capabilities that we would need to deliver a comprehensive service to our clients, using our own resources.

of our common customer requirements, as part of the Highway Maintenance Contract, was to clean out the gullies that the roads drained into. Up till now, we always sub contracted this work to a company called Hawbury Cleansing. But I knew very well that they weren’t always doing the kind of job I

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