Long History, New Horizons

Fri 12 Apr 2019

Long History, New Horizons

Based in the heart of Bridgwater in Somerset, Kellands has a long and illustrious history in the South West of England. The business was founded over 150 years ago in 1858 by a local blacksmith named William Kelland who set out building and repairing agricultural attachments. The business has come a long way since those days and became a limited company in 1950 when Kellands (Plant Sales) Ltd was formed. The company was one of the first in the country to add the Daewoo product to its portfolio, having signed up to become a dealer at the old SED show in 1987. Today under the Doosan banner the South Korean built excavators, wheeled loaders and articulated haulers, continue to be best sellers for them along with other products from Bobcat, Montabert, Geith, Mecalac and Belle to name a few. The appointment of a new management team in 2016 and the demise of another dealership in the South and South East has seen the company expand even further giving them a vast territory that stretches all the way from Cornwall across to Kent, including London, and up to North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol and Gloucester.

Kellands joint Managing Directors Mark Payne and Tim Hill have a wealth of experience behind them and are totally focused on pushing the business forward. We caught up with Tim Hill at the new depot facility in Camelford, Cornwall. Tim is a proper old school plant man and has been with Kellands for 20 years, having started out on the spanners, as a field service engineer, as such, he has been there and done it, so is highly experienced in the industry, Tim takes up the story, “I have basically worked my way up through the ranks during my time with Kellands having started out as an engineer, but there’s no doubt about it, the work can be demanding and it’s a young mans game really and eventually I was suffering with the usual aches and pains that we get, so I was offered a chance to move into machine sales, sales is not for everybody, but I gave it a go and before long I was starting to sell a few machines which was good”. Tim continued, “Within 12 months they wanted someone to run the Devon and Cornwall area, a position which had come about due to a staff retirement, so I then took on the role of Sales Manager in the area overseeing the workshop, service engineers and the parts department”. Following the departure of the Managing Director at the time, the board approached Tim to see if he wanted to take on the MD role, Tim said that he would not consider it on his own, but would be happy to share the role with Mark Payne, the board agreed that this would be a good idea and the rest is history, Tim said, “If someone had said to me back 20 years ago when I started here, that one day I would be MD I would have said, don’t be so bloody stupid! But here we are and I’m proud to be driving on the business that both I and Mark are so passionate about!” The pair who have 42 years of industry experience between them, share an office in the main Bridgwater depot and also share the same passion and vision to drive the company forward Since taking over in 2016 they have seen the business expand from £13 million to £24 million effectively doubling the turnover in 2 years with machine sales having a massive effect.

Expansion into London and the South East continues and the company have recently made a £1million pound investment in purchasing a yard in the Chelmsford area. The company have recruited 2 area salesmen and currently have 4 service engineers working in the London area supporting existing Doosan customers, all of these engineers are self-sufficient working out of parts containers until the depot is fully operational. 3 of these engineers came from the old dealership, talking about this Tim said, “We were approached by these engineers pretty quickly after the closure of the old dealers, it was a totally logical move to take these guys on, all having been well trained and with previous knowledge of the products and the manufacturer so it’s been a great move for both parties really”. All the service side of things is now centrally co-ordinated from the Bridgwater depot, calls for service are all taken on one telephone number but the company have 5 operatives taking the calls to ensure a rapid response time. They have 11 service vans on the road all fitted with trackers. A big screen in the depot monitors where each van is at any one time, with the engineers using an app on there phones to provide feedback. The engineer receives all the detail of the specific job on his phone, he in turn then clicks on the app when he is actually starting the job and clicks off when the job is completed so time spent on any specific task is monitored.

The continual investment hasn’t stopped in London either, the company has always had a satellite depot in Cornwall but its always been a small affair with no machine stock, that has now changed as Tim explained, “We have just invested £160,000 in a brand-new depot in Camelford. We have felt for a long time that nobody local really wants to travel at least 112 miles up the A30 and M5 to look at a machine in Bridgwater, so its very important for us to have machines here in stock that our local customers in Devon and Cornwall can come and look at”. To celebrate the opening of the new Cornish branch Kellands held an Open Day event in October which despite the cold weather was attended by over 50 customers and potential customers and proved to be a good networking day. There was a range of machines on static display but Tim proposes to hold a larger “Dig Day” style event over a couple of days at the new venue in 2019, Tim said, “Its important for us as a company to work on our customer base and to get “bums on seats” so that people can really experience the Doosan product first hand, people expressed an interest in trying out the machines so its something we will definitely be doing next year”.

Pictured Above Left to Right: Ash Hill, Rob Storer, Tim Hill. The Camelford depot team consists of long term Kellands man Rob Storer as Parts Manager and Tim’s son Ash Hill who has taken on the role of Parts Advisor, a new salesman has been taken on to serve the Devon and Cornwall area Lee Sweet who is young, very keen and already doing well according to Tim. Tim also spoke about a number of exciting initiatives the company are engaged in, one of these is a Hire to Buy scheme aimed at the first-time buyer setting up in business. The customer hires the machine from Kellands for a 6-month period, during which time he is generating a deposit, at the end of the 6 months 80% of what the customer paid for the hire goes towards that deposit, a real big help for anyone starting out.

Tim said, “We like to help people as best we can, we have some very big customers down here in Cornwall with the likes of Champion Groundworks, Steve Hoskin Construction and MJL Group, but we are equally passionate about serving the smaller companies and one-man bands, it’s always been our way and will continue to be so”. The company are also working with Worsley Plant promoting their crusher buckets and Tim expects to be showcasing these products at next years dig day event. They will also be available to hire from Kellands along with a wide range of attachments from BPH (Prodem) including hydraulic hammers, selector grabs, processors and compactor plates to name a few.

Summarizing Tim said, “We are entering even more exciting times for Kellands with our great range of products. I must also say that we find Doosan very easy to deal with, the Koreans are very likeable and honourable people and nothing is too much trouble for them, if they say they can do something they will generally do it, we cannot ask for more than that”.

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