FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

What got me really excited about this new business was that it was clear to me that we could be recycling the stuff that we took out of the gullies.

would expect them to do if they were working for me. It was exactly the kind of thing that we should be doing ourselves. So, in 1996, I bought Hawbury Cleansing and put one of my own people, Michael O’Regan, in charge. But, of course, it wasn’t so easy to turn their business around. It was that kind of grey work where it was really hard to see what was going on: they’d get paid for clearing ten gullies when in fact they’d only cleared five. So, I brought Jon Collins in to sort it all out. What he did was bring in technical innovation. We put sensors on the booms so that we could tell not only how many gullies they had gone into, but also how deep into the gully they had been. That wasn’t the only innovation that Jon and I were looking at. What got me really excited about this new business was that it was clear to me that we could be recycling the stuff that we took out of the gullies. It wasn’t all waste: there was water, sand, and stones in there that we could use. I didn’t have the plant to do it, and I didn’t have the space to do it either, so those were things I would have to look into. I needed to have a look around, to do a bit of research with Jon and Roy. I knew they were doing that kind of thing in Switzerland, and probably Germany as well. And even in the UK, people were beginning to talk about recycling at long last. Things were changing, and I wanted to be ready.

But there was one more piece that I had to get in place first. We had recently won a very big contract with the London Borough of Westminster, but we had subcontracted a large part of the work to a company called J.C. Tripp & Son, which was run by two brothers,

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