NICK BROOKES
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Many hauliers complain that there's no money in haulage—but working in a specialist sector can bring results. Adam Hill talks to a Cheshire operator who is doing well in the waste disposal and demolition business...
t must be every schoolboy's dream: the chance to be close to explosions,
watching various buildings destroyed—and to be able to do it all legally. The former schoolboy (who's now turned 3o) laughs politely when CM puts this to him. You get the ii nprcssion that he's heard the one about big bangs before and he's saying nothing. Nick Brookes' dad, Michael, wa:s a demolition contractor for 25 years so young Nick grew up with the trade, helping out on Saturdays and during holidays. The seeds were sown "ever since I was a lad". Nick Brookes Demolition and Waste Disposal is now a Am-turnover company shared between Brookes, his fiancee, Sarah and his dad.
Nick was Rlanning a business career when other boys were thinking of cider,
football and discos. "1 still had my share of that," he laughs. But there was really only one thing he wanted to do. He started at 1-6, hiring out items of plant—mixers, little dumpers and so on—to companies. By v, in response to what he perceived as local demand, he moved into skip hire.
Michael suffered a heart attack which required that he keep a little distance from the day-to-day demolition business. He duly moved more towards property development, calling on his qualifications as a quantity surveyor, and Nick took up the reins.
We got the waste side of the business going," he explains. Clients such as Bryants. Barratts and Bovis were familiar from his dad's business and at 19 Brookes had another wagon on the road. By the time he met Sarah in 1992 there were four. Tipping at a landfill is not necessarily the most cost-effective way of doing business, and Brookes swiftly decided that waste transfer was where more money was. The company combined its demolition business with the waste disposal work, taking advantage of the synergies between the two: building sites need demolition work, which in turn creates waste which needs to be recycled and can then be taken to private customers (topsoil) or taken back to construction companies (hardcore as the basis for site access roads). This gives Brookes the opportunity to haul backloads between a variety of locations.
The company has invested in a new waste transfer station at its Wardle HQ. There was a frustrating three-year wait between planning and going online, during which ookes could not realistically expand. But his thence has been rewarded. At one time it luld deal with about 5o skips per day. Now, ith a site six times the size, the company has ready doubled that throughput and has enty of capacity for growth.
'ransf or station
dps are owned by Brookes or firms working r local utilities companies. They are tipped to the central building at the Wardle waste ansfer station and a machine sorts out the ood, plastic and rubbish, leaving soil and irdcore. That goes through the screening plant, which comprises a huge drum "like a big washing machine". The material moves from there onto conveyors where the lighter material is blown off, leaving topsoil and three grades of hardcore. From there it goes to gardens, construction areas and industrial sites.
"We have a lot of equipment now," says Brookes. The company also has a mobile crusher which deals with everything on sites except wood, scrap and plastic (this goes to landfill). But in general, recycling is the key. "About 8o% of the waste into the transfer station is recycled," he reports.
From Wardle, Brookes has good access to Crewe, Nantwich and Sandbach on one side and to Northwich and Chester as far as Macclesfield on the other. The demolition business, which comprises about 3o% of turnover, usually has four sites on the go, and is booked solid for the next six months. The firm employs about so staff and some subcontractors too.
Expansion is most certainly on the cards but Brookes is picky about what and where. The company even ran bin wagons up to 18 months ago, when it sold that business. It didn't fit in and we wanted to concentrate on waste," he says.
At about the same time five companies were coming up with offers—not just for the bin wagon side of things, but for the whole caboodle. Surely that must have been tempting? "No," he says. "It would have been hard at the end of the day to get our market back. We've only just started and there's scope to grow."
This remark speaks volumes: Brookes and his partners are in this business for the long haul.
Brookes is also interested in acquiring its own landfill site as an addition to its core processing business. In early 2002 it will add another facet to its waste transfer station with the introduction of a picking line—manual labour standing at the conveyor belts and removing another layer of material, mainly plastic and wood, that can be used elsewhere.
Big business
"In Germany and Holland it's big business," says Brookes, who reckons that both countries are eight years ahead of the UK. "We seem to be getting their second-hand equipment," he says. Be that as it may, it's no surprise that Brookes is keen to be ahead of the game in this country.
And the future holds something else: marriage to Sarah. But there is no date yet, he insists: "We can't afford to get married. I keep buying wagons." Sarah interjects: "He's not made enough money for me yet!" They are joking, of course, but in the truck industry, romance is measured in a different way to ordinary people in civvy street. With a neat touch of the Stobarts, Sarah's name is painted on the company's latest acquisition, a Scania lowloader. And remember that Nick Brookes is the man who was canny enough to diversify his commercial interests—at the age of 17. There is much more to come from this quiet firm with the loud business.