The company was founded in 1971 by two tradesmen, Charles Lowe and John Purcell. Fed up with an industry that laid off its workforce before Christmas or at the end of a project to minimise holiday pay, the partners were determined to do things differently. • Our clients award us contracts because of our people. They ask for members of our delivery teams by name, from the directors to the people working out on site. This is due to our direct labour policy, which is a part of our history and values. Our direct employment policy has been in place since the company’s formation 50 years ago and we work hard to retain all our employees, whether they be office or site-based. We have an average length of service of over 10 years and an awareness of collaboration is embedded within all our training activities and inductions on-site. This stability assists collaborative working.
Construction is very much a people industry, therefore a key objective of the business is building and maintaining relationships with existing and potential clients. Due to this we have grown profit by 1300% and a turnover of 57% since our 2019/20 figures. Everyone in the business is incredibly proud of the essential work we carried out during this difficult period. We gained new clients during this time such as One Manchester, The Hut Group and BASF, and worked on key projects for blue-chip clients such as ITV and Royal Mail Group. We had to ensure that we focused heavily on minimising the risk of Covid spreading through our sites. Everyone on our sites followed the correct government guidance to stay safe and we are very proud of how we enforced this and managed it throughout. Manchester and Cheshire have come out even stronger than before Covid begun, we have improved ways of working and introduced new methods, we have improved communication within the business by utilising software such as Teams which we had in place prior to Covid meaning all staff were ahead of the curve. Cloud-based storage and utilising SharePoint to transfer information online was something we used during this time, and we have now taken this to the next level. They have become central to how we function. We now have a varied network of clients that we value very highly, and these are sustainable clients whom we want to keep working for in the future.
