13 September 2010
It may have taken Julie White a couple of decades and a few hundred thousand miles to realise it – but she was always going to run D-Drill.
White is the owner and managing director of the company – which specialises in diamond drilling and surface preparation for the construction industry – and took over the company from her father, Peter, who founded it in the 1960s.
One of her first memories was tip-toeing down the stairs of the family home in the middle of the night to find her father mending a machine at the kitchen table. She stayed and helped, perched on her father’s toolbox.
But while that might have been the age in which she got hooked, it was far from a straightforward succession.
“I remember those times really fondly” she said. “My father first saw diamond drilling in action when he was working as an electrician’s apprentice on Coventry Cathedral.
“There was a guy who had brought the machinery into the UK but did not really know how to use it to its full potential, so my dad helped him in the evenings and that really gave him the idea.
“There was always something going on at home because of the business. There were guys stopping over on the way to jobs, meetings round the kitchen table and my dad was often away for weeks at a time working.
“I went off to college and did a business diploma and started to work in the business. I began in the contracts office as a filing clerk and worked my way up to be an assistant manager of one of our depots.
“But I did reach a stage where I thought there must be more to life. I decided to go travelling and told my dad. He said he would give me three months – and I proved him wrong by going for 12 years!”
But this was no ordinary back-packing trip. White did 27,000 miles in 11 months seeing the US, but did not escape diamond drilling altogether.
“I was packing up my stuff ready to go and my father gave me the Diamond Drilling Association book with the details of all the members in the States,” she said.
“He said that if I was ever in trouble I should pick up a phone to call a member and they would either know him, or if I explained who I was, they would help. I put it into my rucksack thinking I would never use it, but it proved really useful. I met some great people and really built up some great contacts.”
During her travels, White got into sailing and it became a major hobby. She went from being a deckhand on yachts, to taking part in the Whitbread Round the World Race and skippering superyachts.
But after a period skippering a yacht in the Med for a businessman, she decided she needed to return home.
“It was a great life”, she explained. “I had my own crew and engineer and as long as I did the accounts and had the yacht ready for its owner, the rest of my time was largely my own to have fun on the water.
“But there were younger people coming along and it was just a case of having to move on.”
She returned home and hit on a business idea when she saw a salesman demonstrating a diamond grinding machine to her father that could remove adhesive from concrete floors. It was at a time when many DIY stores were undergoing major refurbishment programmes which included re-flooring. They invested and the business – Superfloor – took off.
White said: “We did it by just calling round, but really hit it at the right time, picked up our first contract and off we went. Focus Do-It-All had just taken over Wickes and underwent a massive upgrade which saw us do more than 100 stores, and they were big stores.”
The company grew to employ 38 staff, but at the same time her father, Peter, was looking at succession planning and asked her if she would take over at D-Drill.
“I knew the business very well and, having been brought up with it from a young age, I was very passionate about it,” she said.
“But I knew if I just took over the running of it, I would never really be able to make the changes I felt needed making, so I said I would do it as long as I could buy the company and buy out the shareholders.”
That took no little persuading, a lot of work and a late change in banks before managing to make it happen. And she kept Peter very much on-side.
She said: “It was difficult because there were family members who were shareholders, but I knew that it would only work if I had 100 per cent.”
That was just over two years ago – and just weeks before the recession hit. Turnover plunged by 20 per cent in a matter of months and then fell again another 20 per cent as the downturn spread from residential to commercial property.
Again White knew she had to be decisive. She took out a layer of middle management from the firm – which has 10 branches and employs 150 people – brought in an operations director from outside the industry and invested in new software and systems.
It has not been without its pain. Some of the staff who had to leave were again family members but stripping out around £1.5 million of costs, White believes, not only saved the company at the time but has also made it leaner going forward.
“Prices are still very tight but I hope that we are over the worst of it. Winter is not the best time in our industry but this year we had a profitable February for the first time in our history,” she said.
“It is a strange industry because we only have a 48-hour order book. Construction firms and builders assess the couple of days ahead, realise they have a need for our services and call us up.
“We do have longer lead-time jobs but in the main it is very short notice – and trying selling that to a bank as a business proposition. Fortunately Handelsbanken understood it when others didn’t.
“The new systems we have introduced means that our branch managers, who are our most experienced staff, can concentrate on getting out there to meet customers and sell. They don’t see it as selling, but their experience and passion are our best adverts.”
But those staff are getting older, so even during the downturn White maintained the company’s apprenticeship scheme to ensure a pipeline of talent.
She now believes that the time is right for growth – and is setting off on a mission to get closer to the clients.
Hopefully, for D-Drills’ sake, she will be away for less than 12 years!
Working Day
White’s days begin early and are always packed and varied – “plenty of time to sleep when you are dead” is her motto.
If the day is due to being in the office, she travels the short distance from her home in Brinklow to the company’s headquarters in Bulkington and is usually in around 7am.
But no two days are the same. A great deal of the last two years has been spent making sure action was taken to ride out the recession. With that in place, she now spends more time visiting clients and strengthening links with major construction firms right across the UK and is a regular on site, seeing her team in action.
She also regularly travels to the company’s branches.
White leaves the office somewhere between 6.30pm and 7.30pm and heads for the gym.
At weekends she often heads for her bolthole in Aberdovey where she indulges in her passions of windsurfing, kite surfing and wakeboarding. She is also studying for her helicopter pilots’ licence.
Lives: Brinklow
Educated: Bishop Wolston
Married: Never – but asked several times!
Children: No
Favourite film: Some Like It Hot
Book: I am not a big reader but I got through Schindler’s List when I was delivering a yacht in the Red Sea, and it made a real impact on me. I usually drop off to sleep with my helicopter air law book on my chest!
Car: BMW X5 for towing boats, and an Audi A5
Favourite Gadget: New release line on my kite surfer.
The above article appeared in the Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce’s C&W in Business magazine.
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