COMPANY PROFILE BY SANDRA DICK
Nothing plastic about legal eagle Will’s fi rm
WHEN a teenage Will Nicholls headed off to study law at Hull University, his career path seemed mapped out.
Books under his arm and with an eye for a legal conundrum, his future appeared to involve working in a crisp, clean offi ce - where the only recycling to worry about was whether to put the takea- way coff ee cup in the general waste, or the cardboard bin.
And, of course, with all those clients who’d be charged by the hour, there was a good, steady salary to look forward to.
Today though, law graduate Will is about as far removed from the stuff y surroundings of a solicitors’ practice as possible.
Outside his offi ce in Ecogen Recycling’s yard are stack after stack of cardboard that’s arrived from around the country, been sorted, and is now bound up and baled waiting for the next stage of its journey.
Lorries roll in to the two acre site in Alresford, Hampshire, from the north of Scotland to England’s south east, piled high with tonnes of cardboard, paper and plastic – from lower grade pallet wrap fi lm to premium waste production scrap.
The route to business success was planned on a dining table
One time lawyer Will has swapped the fi ne points of the English legal system for rolling his sleeves up and running a business that processes thousands of tonnes of waste every week. The company dreamed up at his mum’s dining table, now turns over roughly £2.5m a year – considerably more than the average small town solicitor is likely to rake in.
He’s far from your typical law graduate or recycling business boss – the fi nely tuned accent is a give away for a start. And no-one’s more surprised about how it’s turned out, than him.
“I left Hull University where I did law, and wanted a part time job. I ended up getting one with a plastic recycling company,” he recalled.
“It was meant to be temporary, but then I started to enjoy it. I started off in a basic administration role, got a better job in sales, and then I became operations manager.”
After eight years, the business had grown, but so had Will. “I went to my boss and said I want to get married and have a family, I need more money, some progression. I wanted to move up to director level,” he recalls.
The response wasn’t encouraging...
“I had about £1,500 - not much to get a business going,” he laughs. “And it’s hard to start a recycling business from scratch. You need premises, money and equipment. But I had very good friends and a vision for a business that I thought would work.”
Will quit, sold his home and moved with his new wife Megan back into his parents’ house. From the dining table, he plotted his vision for Ecogen Recycling.
PROBLEM GETTING VISION OFF THE GROUND He wanted to build a commercial recycling company that would share with customers the fi nancial rewards their waste generates. There would be trucks around the country sub-contracted to pick up plastic, paper and cardboard, a processing plant to sort it, and connections for selling it on, plus the skills he’d honed from eight years in the industry.
The only problem was getting his vision off the ground.
“I had some very good friends at TJ Waste and Recycling in Fareham,” explains Will. “They were good to me, and for the fi rst two years we shared one of their sites with them.
“I’m friends with Jamie Higgins, the director there. I’d been doing plastics recycling, and told him about my idea. He said you can have an offi ce, and we’ll charge you per tonne for everything that goes through the site.
“They helped me build up the business.”
By September 2012 Ecogen Recycling was properly trading, taking in waste from customers, and then paying them back in rebates based on the income it generated.
A move to a new location at a former sawmill in Alresford, a picturesque, upmarket town in Hampshire where the average house price is in the £500,000 range, enabled the business to spread its wings. Now it employs 16 people, last year it turned over £2.5m, and paid out £1.8m in rebates to the companies it works with.
For many clients, Ecogen Recycling’s business model comes with the advantage of turning what was a cost, into an income stream.
28
SHM June, 2017
www.skiphiremagazine.co.uk
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