COMPANY FOCUS: ET CLAY PRODUCTS
BUILDING A BUSINESS BRICK BY BRICK
I
t’s one of those sad-but-true facts that few, if any, school-leavers aspire to sell bricks for a living when they leave. “No-one ever really leaves school and says that they want to sell bricks as a living. It just sort of happens.” It happened to Eddie Turze, the co-owner and managing director of Essex-based ET Clay Products. Twenty-five years later, Turze is celebrating the company’s quarter-century and looking forward to the next.
Turze’s first role in the brick industry was working for a brick factor, being instrumental in setting up a London operation for a Manchester-based company. Parting company from them in 1994, he decided to bite the bullet and use his experience and expertise to start up on his own. “I started working from home, brick matching for local merchants with whom I had built up a good relationship and reputation.”
Turze says that, having started out as brick factor which was all sales and no actual stock, what he really wanted to do was to have a yard and hold stock. “We expanded slowly and once we felt the business was strong enough we took the leap of faith into renting a yard and putting stock on the ground,” he says. ET Clay Products now employs 50 staff, with two depots – one in South Ockendon just north of the Dartford Crossing and one in Minworth, near Sutton Coldfield - two satellite offices and a stockholding that’s in excess of four million bricks. The company structure is now made up of Turze as owner and managing director, his wife Sharon Turze is co-owner. Melvyn Hillstead is operations director, David Blitz is commercial director, Jim Hawkins sales director and Imran Khalid is finance director.
“We have very good depot managers at both depots,” Turze continues, “and some of our staff have been with us for 20 years and staff retention is really good. We put that down to having a good family atmosphere in the business and that is reflected throughout. I am very passionate about the bricks and aim to be a very hands-on managing director. I wanted to be a brick merchant, not a builder’s merchant. We just focus on our strengths which are that we stock in depth and in a wide variety of brick types, styles and colours.” Hillstead adds: “Although we probably have around 250 different types of brick in stock at any one time, we are able to source many more than that, through our relationships with brick manufacturers.”
He says that many merchants use ET Clay Products’ huge stockholding as a way of augmenting their own stock levels as well as relying on them for advice. “We have a simple philosophy: people tell us what their brief is in terms of size, colour, price and technical requirement and we can match to that brief.” Turze adds that the company is a huge supporter of UK brick manufacturing. “I’ve spent a lot of time travelling round the continent finding bricks to suit the UK market, but where possible we will promote the ranges of UK manufacturers,” he says.
There are four main customer sectors that the company deal with on a regular basis, Hillstead explains. “There’s your Mr and Mrs Smith, who are building an extension or a self-build project. Then there are builders merchants who simply don’t have the room in their own yards to stock the range that we do. Merchants will also send their customers along to look at and choose the bricks, and we do all the transactions via the merchants ‘accounts, so that means we do also have developers and contractors as customers, usually serviced via the merchant accounts. That said, there are some direct accounts with larger companies who wouldn’t be dealing via merchants anyway.
Then there are architects but we go to visit them to talk about their needs rather than them coming to us.” Turze says that the company also has sales people out on the road visiting customers to discuss
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In 25 years, ET Clay Products have stocked and sold a lot of bricks and the Essex-based company has no intention of stopping, as Fiona Russell Horne finds out
their needs. “We aren’t beholden to one manufacturer, so that means we can offer real independent and unbiased advice and a wide section of products. That’s why, I believe, we have been so successful.
Turnover in the current financial year is likely to be around the £26m mark. “That’s a lot of bricks,” Turze says.
To mark the company’s quarter-century, there is a fund-raising drive on behalf of Macmillan UK. “We will have a celebration with staff and suppliers to help mark the event, but as I’m in the 25th year of doing this, I wanted to give something back, to show some appreciation of what the industry given to me,” he says. Thus, the intention is to raise £25,000 for Macmillan Cancer Support. “Sadly, it’s a charity that most people have had or will have contact with at some point. One of the main ways we are raising the money is via a directors’ bike ride from our Minworth depot on Sunday, September 22nd, to the South Ockenden depot. It’s 144 miles
so we’ll be getting there a few days later, and the biggest challenge of all is that I haven’t been on a bike for about 40 years so I have been in intense training mode. I believe that I can’t expect people to support me in my efforts unless I really do put the effort in myself.” Employees are also being encouraged to do their own fund raising on the side as a way of adding to the total and there’s also a competition to correctly guess the number of bricks in the South Ockenden yard on October 12th; the winner will get £500 in vouchers. “We are hoping that all our customers and suppliers will support us. There’s a JustGiving (
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/ etclayproductsltd) donation page and in the depots we are encouraging people to donate and get involved.”
The plan for the next 25 years is to continue the steady expansion of the business, bringing more of Turze’s family through in terms of succession. “The industry has evolved a lot in the 25 years we have been going. No-one knows how it will change over the next 15 or so, but we hope to continue to build on our relationships with customers and suppliers to benefit all of us. We are very aware of the value that we get both from customers and suppliers. We work hard on building up those relationships on both sides as we know that without the suppliers and the customers we don’t have a business.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net September 2019
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