PLANE TALK
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Marcus Clay (right) got his motivation to succeed from an undeserved snipe from a colleague. Now, he has not only achieved what he set out to do, he has expansion plans, too. The core of his young business is hauling away road planings and selling them to road constructors.
Wua young man is setting out on his career, unwarranted criticism from a colleague can either make him throw in the towel—or set out to prove his colleague wrong. Marcus Clay took the second of those options. He left school 12 years ago with few qualifications. Now, aged 28, Clay is managing director of Tamworthbased MAC Contracting which has a projected turnover of Lim during its first year of operation.
Half the company's business involves taking road planings off site as they are taken from road surfaces, then selling them to construction companies which recyle the material as a capping layer or the basis for new roads. Clay provides free haulage to planing contractors such as Asfare, Powerplane, National Road Plane and Northern Motorways in return for their waste road surface material.
The other half of MAC Contracting's turnover is generated from excavation work. He owns three excavators, and hires others as needed. These machines excavate subsoil and contaminated material from roadworks; his tippers take it away to landfill sites. Clay left school with just a handful of CSEs but he is well qualified in the tipper industry, where he worked before setting up 111AC Contracting last October.
He started on a two-year Youth Training Scheme with Drive Training Management Service in Earl Shilton, Leics, during which time he passed his CPC on an evening course. When the scheme finished he got a temporary job with Carryfast over Christmas. Then he went to TNT's Atherstone hub, where he worked in the traffic office for six months. In 1989 he moved on to tipper operator KSD in Nuneaton where he "did a bit of everything".
Too young