One of WH Bond & Sons Ltd’s new Volvo EC140E excavators on a typical groundworking project in the heart of Plymouth
It’s a quality brand that we want in our fleet…”
So says Steve Courts, Plant Manager for the highly respected Cornish family business, WH Bond and Sons Ltd, of St Ive near Liskeard, referring to operating Volvo Construction Equipment products.
The VOICE was invited to pay a visit to the sixty-year-old company to find out the reasons for them choosing Volvo Construction Equipment products for their fleet. Meeting up at the company headquarters in the village of St Ive, we found out about WH Bond’s history from Steve Courts and the company’s marketing co-ordinator, Jessica Oatey. Company founder, William Hermon Bond, was a tenant of Port Eliot Estate. He farmed around 30 acres which was, at that time, supplemented by a local milk round until the family were able to move to nearby Trerulefoot and a larger 140-acre farm in 1942. William could see that the rapid improvement in yields was going to cause over-production and told his three sons – Jim, Hermon and Martin – that they would “farm themselves out of business”. This piece of advice would lead the Bond family to become ‘serial diversifiers’ for the next 60 years with a variety of businesses. They knew that diversification was the way forward and began their strategy in the 1930’s when the bed and breakfast and caravan site was started. A few years later, William joined forces with his three sons and in 1957, WH Bond & Sons was established. The path of the company’s strategy took them down the route of civil and agricultural contracting, forestry and into the
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world of construction plant and equipment. Their passion for branching out led the Bond family to create and build St Mellion Golf & Country Club – now known as the St Mellion International Resort – which was opened by Mr WH Bond in 1976. As part of this venture, in 1989 the Bond family travelled to the USA to meet with Jack Nicklaus and, as a result, they designed and built the first Jack Nicklaus golf course in the UK. Fast forward to 1997 and the third generation of Bonds – Jon, Chris and Alison took over the day-to-day running of the company and on the success of the St Mellion and other similar projects, the civil engineering and plant hire side of the business was formally established and by 2003 was turning over in excess of £300,000 a year. At the same time it saw the acquisition of Bake Sawmill to create another division, Bond Timber, which rapidly expanded into a major factor towards the company’s success.
In 2007, the company celebrated fifty years of strong and successful business which was followed seven years later with the move to new and larger premises in St Ive. Here, the WH Bond plant fleet continued to expand to over 400 units of mobile plant and coincided with the company’s first encounter with Volvo excavators. “We took our first Volvo excavators
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