Alex Turner meets KEITH MOLLARD, of A&M Insulations

ALTHOUGH it was late on a Friday afternoon when I sat down with Keith Mollard, he was relaxed.

Not for him a frantic rush to squeeze the last remaining drops of productivity out of a busy week at A&M Insulations.

Instead, he sat back in the boardroom at the firm’s Rainford headquarters and declared: “People who worry shouldn’t go into business.”

He set up in business after he saw an opportunity, shrugged off the small fact that it was in an area that he had no experience in, and got on with getting on.

Mr Mollard and his business partner, Alan Atherton, are both engineers by training, but also by mentality, an approach that helped them in the early days.

He said: “We are both engineers – we can turn our hand to anything.”

That’s exactly what the duo did in 1972, when they put in £200 each to launch the company.

“I was works manager at Hygena and Alan Atherton was in charge of services,” he said.

“We had our houses insulated and we said ‘this has got to be the thing of the future’.

“And here we are, 30 years later, we are still waiting.”

There’s a tongue-in-cheek nature to his comments.

Although the company has grown slowly for much of its time – it took 17 years to achieve annual sales of £1m and another 10 to achieve £3m – it then increased sales eightfold in eight years.

Its most recent accounts, for the year to December, 2008, show a £2m profit on sales of £23.3m – healthy growth from the previous year’s performance of £1.2m profit on £17m sales.

As well as the scale of the company, the way it gets work has also changed significantly.

He said: “We used to do a lot of council contracts, 400-500 house contracts. Now it’s all one-offs.

“You can have cavity wall insulation for £199 and loft insulation for £199 – that’s subsidised by the energy retailer.

“The householder pays us that much and we claim the balance from the energy retailer.”

The Government has a carbon emissions reduction target (CERT) which set a three-year target for energy retailers to reduce carbon emissions by 154m tonnes.

While the climate change agenda is behind the trend of A&M Insulation’s growth, Mr Mollard blames the Government’s handling of CERT for the industry only doing 500,000 cavity wall insulations last year, down from 800,000 a year earlier.

“The industry has been decimated in the last 12 months,” he said.

“At this point in time, the energy retailer is so far ahead of their target they are not bringing in people so we now have an army of people knocking on doors.

“The next nine months will be really tough and then the requirement for the energy retailers will double and we will be wishing to expand back in to that.

“We have shrunk, we are 10-15% less this year than in 2008, but we will be looking to shoot up to over £30m in 2011.”

That target is a far cry from the company’s beginnings, when its founders fitted it in around their full-time jobs.

Mr Mollard said: “The early years, we would do a house in the weekend when we were still working. We actually did it ourselves. We only did domestic work in those days, then we started to get council contracts.

“It took 10 years to get established, to get a good ‘in’ to all the builders and all the local authorities.

“Ours is an industry where most of the work is done between £300 and £400.

“To keep this business running properly, we need to find 1,000 houses a week.”

The roll-your-sleeves-up approach is one that he continues to look for in potential employees.

He said: “There are two types of people: self-starters and kick- starters. You spend your business life looking for self-starters but most of them go into business themselves.

“I couldn’t sit at a desk with nothing to do.”

That energy translates into frustration at other people’s failure to act.

“What really annoys me is people who won’t make a decision,” he said. “Sometimes you are better off making the wrong decision than making no decision.

“Indecision and procrastination are terrible things. There are times when you have to move.

“Twice we have taken on companies when the auditors said ‘don’t touch it’. We applied the same techniques and it made money.”

A&M now has six branches around the country – Wrexham, West Bromwich, Cardiff, Swindon, Maidstone and Southampton – and employs about 300 people.

He said:“We started making acquisitions in 1995. In the main, we bought companies that were collapsing.

“We thought there were no reasons for them to collapse. Wherever you are, the model is the same.

“We have taken over companies that were bust and we have turned them around.

“We established ourselves in St Helens and bought businesses around the country. We bought a company, JSL, in West Bromwich, a number of years ago.

“I put their monthly management figures alongside ours and I could see the two areas they were losing money on.

“We can compare each branch and each category, direct labour, indirect labour, transport, materials and compare.”

It’s part of the uncomplicated approach he adopts.

“Management doesn’t change,” he said. “It never has done.

“It’s only like playing Monopoly.

“I’d sooner take people with me than drive them in front of me. There’s a lot of good people work here and around the country.

“You try to keep the good ones and look after them.

“The other ones you have to engineer them to leave or when they offer to leave, you let them go.”

Looking after “the good ones” is especially important, as both Mr Mollard and Mr Atherton have family working at the firm.

He is confident that the company is a strong position to capitalise on the industry’s inevitable growth.

“The potential for this industry until 2030 is enormous,” he said.

“After cavity wall insulation they will start doing 200,000 solid wall insulation houses a year from 2012. That will be at £8-£10,000 a go.

“That will be coupled with renewables. From 2015, all new-build houses have to be carbon neutral.

“We have grown it quite well but the potential for those following us is even bigger.”