The Hurst Group

Source: Construction Digital

Date :31/05/2007 16:58:22

TOGETHER WE RULE

The Hurst Group is a family firm started life as a small operation performing a number of tasks. Splitting it into specialised companies made each stronger, but like independent members of a family, when they come together they can take on the big jobs

Written by John O’Hanlon and produced by Alex Smith

The Hurst group was established in 1969 at Brighouse in Yorkshire by Norman and Jeannie Hurst. In those days it was a traditional shopfitting company, and it might have remained just that had it not been for the entrepreneurship of its founders and leaders since then. This spirit enabled the firm to evolve into a leading specialist interior contractor and construction process management company. It is still a family-owned firm, however. Though the founders are still an active presence in the firm, the second generation is firmly established in succession, with Gary Hurst running the Joinery subsidiary, Craig the core Stores and Interiors business, and their sister Leanne taking charge of the group’s human resources.

Nearly half the group’s £60 million annual turnover is accounted for by Hurst Stores and Interiors. Its clients include some of the biggest high street retailers in the UK, including Marks & Spencer, Asda, Tesco, Woolworths, Habitat and The Body Shop –but the list goes on, and it also works with major contractors like Sir Robert McAlpine and Laing O’Rourke, sometimes as part of a consortium, sometimes as a standalone subcontractor.

The ability to adapt

The group’s flexibility is its great strength, says Sales Director Alastair Craven, and the one factor that has enabled it to weather the fluctuations (currently only describable as a full-scale decline) in the retail sector over the years. By subdividing the group into separate companies, each able to develop its specialist technologies and its own client base, yet able to work together when turnkey solutions are what the client wants, the company has been able to expand at a rate Craven estimates currently at around 15 per cent per annum. For example, Hurst Joinery Projects is the dedicated manufacturing business of the group, providing bespoke and batch joinery both to retailers and main contractors. It has no standard products – everything is built to order, and its biggest contract to date is as part of the £20 million Laing-O’Rourke contract to construct the new 10,000 square metre Isle of Capri regional casino at Coventry’s Ricoh Arena, which was officially opened on February 24th this year (the arena, not the casino, which has yet to be finished). Hurst Group’s share of the action amounts to a cool £1 million, and projects like this are a great showcase for the company, though the bread and butter business is still in the retail sector, where clients like Vision Express, JJB sports and Marks & Spencer provide a large proportion of the company’s annual £5 million turnover.

Strong partnerships

Hurst Building Services was a spin-off of the infrastructure capabilities within the company. It was established in 1985 to provide a complete mechanical, electrical and structured cabling package to all sectors of the construction industry. Nearly two decades later, with annual sales of about £10 million, the company is one of the most important parts of the Hurst Group, enjoying strong working partnerships with major construction companies, as well as public authorities, large retailers, leisure groups and restaurant chains. It does a lot of work for the retail group Matalan with recently completed projects on stores in Bradford, Cwmbran, Ayr, Carmarthen and Bognor Regis. It is also upgrading the cooling systems to a number of stores nationwide, and working on new stores to be opened next year in Merthyr Tydfil and Scarborough.

Of the remaining principal companies in the group Hurst Ceilings and Flooring, which works mainly for main contractors such as Sir Robert McAlpine, whose expansion of the Metro Centre at Gateshead re-established it as the largest in Europe, was also a spin-out from the original foundation. Hurst Ceilings helped in the design of the upper mall ceilings which proved technically to be some of the most difficult to construct. Hurst Plastics, a company that Norman Hurst bought out of receivership some ten years ago, is something of a standalone operation, based in Hull and with no real synergies with the rest of the group. It was however a very successful business turnaround, now generating some £15 million in sales annually.

Supply chain sense

In 2000, the whole group moved from the two factories it occupied at Brighouse (one to do the machining, the other the assembly) to its present Bradford location, uniting all the core companies under one roof. Here too it established its modern 50,000 square foot factory, with CNC saws and routers, a CAD design department, bench assembly and a state of the art polishing shop. The company recently updated its fleet of more than 30 trucks, and last year was accredited to ISO 9001 across all of its operations. “ISO 9001 means that we have a quality system in place for everything, from ordering raw materials right through to when the product leaves the premises. We now have SOPs for all our processes,” says Craven.

While the Hurst companies’ consumption of raw materials is not massive, it does make the best possible use of supply chain economies by negotiating retrospective rebates with suppliers wherever possible. The company is an approved Corian fabricator (Corian is a hard wearing counter surface manufactured by DuPont), and has negotiated six months accounts as well as retrospective rebates with this and other laminate suppliers. Now it is aiming to do the same thing with the increasing volumes of glass and metal it is using as fashions and styles change. “We don’t keep a lot in stock,” says Alastair Craven. “Our priority is to keep a good relationship going with our key suppliers. Most of them are able to deliver standard materials for next day delivery.”

A major advance in the last year has been the implementation of new design software, says Craven. “We have just invested £25,000 in a new software package for our setting-out department called Inventa, which is into 3D imaging. Before we manufacture anything we do drawing to show what it will look like – a bar, say or a reception desk. We produce fabrication drawings from that to show our joiners how it is put together. Inventa is a CAD package that allows you to spin the design through 3D, show it to the customers, change the colour scheme, the laminate or the veneer, and basically show all the options. It also produces what we call a cut sheet, which is a list of all the parts that have to be machined. Each part has a separate number, and the software records the dimensions of each. The cut sheets are now programmed directly into the machines. We used to have to do that by hand, but now it is all automated. If the client decides he wants the desk to be slightly longer, or we have to accommodate lower access for disabled users, for example, that can be done at the touch of a button. “We have found that the new software has speeded things up noticeably,” says Alastair Craven. “We are in the last phase of training now.”

Downtown moves uptown

When you look at the Hurst Group’s references, you’d be forgiven for thinking it remains almost entirely dependent on the retail sector, but with price competition for Eastern Europe and China it has become impossible to compete for run-of-the-mill joinery work where price is the bottom line, says Craven. That competition is acute at the bottom end of the market, though it would be hard for a cut price operator achieving the quality and style evident in the work Hurst Joinery Projects does in installing Café Revive in M&S stores, or in support of Vision Express’s vigorous expansion programme. “We have a very good relationship with Vision Express,” says Craven. “We will do between 25 and 30 stores for them this year. But in general I’d say we have moved to the more fancy office fit-out projects, which is a quick turnaround business with better margins. London and all the big cities in the UK are experiencing something of a fitting-out boom at the moment. Then we are looking closely at the leisure sector where there’s a lot of investment in new facilities.” Schools, and a growing amount of work for the National Health Service, provide another growing alternative market for all of the group companies as the high street changes, he says. Nevertheless JJB Sports is a good indicator of the way some retailers are reinventing themselves. The company is opening health centres throughout the country and each one, typically with retail premises on the same site, represents an investment of some £2 million.

Having separate companies with separate management and accounts means that each can turn to the market with its particular skills and competencies, but come together when one of these health and fitness clubs is developed: it’s a single job, but Hurst Stores and Interiors will do the fitting out, Building Services the mechanical and electrical installation, air conditioning and the like, Ceilings and Flooring will contribute what it says on the tin, plus any partitioning, and Hurst Joinery will manufacture the reception desks.