GRADEN Designs ...
What makes Keith Kensett tick? TREVOR LEDGER finds out
It’s easy enough to pigeonhole people and think that, once labelled, you have their measure. More often than not this is a bad idea, especially when you are looking at Keith Kensett of Kensett Sports - the ‘Graden Man’ to many of us. There you go again, ‘the Graden Man’, while Keith is the first to admit that the success of the original Graden machine - of which more later - has been very good for him, it is part of a business that has more to offer and consistently does so. Kensett Sports was started off in 1968 by Keith’s dad and very soon ‘Junior’ was on the payroll. Initially helping out at weekends and evenings, the task of maintaining cricket pitches, football pitches and posh gardens in the South East of England meant that Keith had to put aside childish things and take to the mower. So was this a youth of hard work and blisters? Not unless he got them playing football and squash which is what he spent most of this time doing - up to near international standards in the latter. “It was successful for what it was,” remembered Kensett who continued “which was a small family business. It got to be a bigger deal when I started doing a lot of work for Parkers of Worcester Park. They were the Rigby Taylors of their day, in fact Rigby Taylor bought them.”
Whatever he does he has fun doing it ...
It’s clear that while Kensett loves his work - try getting him to put down his mobile for five minutes - he loves life more and it was getting married to Jane that made him reassess - “To be honest I didn’t really do a lot of work then; Jane was an air hostess and I just kind of jetted round the place with her and had a lot of fun.” And this is the essence of Keith Kensett - whatever he does, he has fun doing it. Check him out at a trade show and, if you can ever get him to stop talking to someone else, he’ll talk you through his latest product with all the enthusiasm of a first time parent at a baptism. For most of us a machine is a useful tool, a beautiful, useful tool at best. Not for Kensett, oh no.
For Kensett a machine is a miracle, a thing of wonder and something that really ought to be shouted about as loudly and as often as possible - this thing is fantastic, mega, amazing! All of which makes it come as a bit of a surprise when you get through the general chat and get to the nub of what Kensett Sports is all about, “We don’t sell machines, we sell a process. Everything we do is agronomically sound and it is always new.” A claim that I had to stop and take stock of, is everything they do new and innovative? Yes it is - the original Graden from Australia, the zero turn mower, the sand injector from Graden, the Gwazae deep injector, a new spraying system coming next year - everything that has come from Keith Kensett has been either totally groundbreaking (pun sort of intentional…) or a massive improvement on what has gone before. While the concept of scarification is as old as the hills, what the Graden deep scarifier could do was positively revolutionary - it didn’t evolve from something that already existed, it was a brand new invention. And Kensett spotted it on a small, sparsely populated booth at the GCSAA Show in 1995. Finding Graham Dryden, the owner of Graden - GRAham dryDEN, get it? - at the San Francisco show was just what Kensett needed in 1995. In 1990 he had suddenly decided that he need to buckle down and make things happen with his business, it was parenthood that did it: “I was a late starter really, when my son was born I realised that I needed to get on with it and make a real success of the company. It all started when I went over to the American show, they were so far ahead of us at the time that it just gave me so many ideas. When I went to the San Francisco show I saw Graham on this little booth I just said what is it? He said “It’s a verti- cutter” and I said ‘What’s a verti-cutter?’ That’s how we got started but it was a couple of years before I got the distribution for Europe.”
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