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Profile with Garvis Snook: Wise words from businessman building on firm foundations
IT was the first time, and possibly the last, a chief executive has recited poetry to me.
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you," began Garvis Snook, chief executive of construction firm Rok.
Inside a glass-walled meeting room at the group's London City office, Snook delivers the first couple of lines of Rudyard Kipling's If.
"It's something I often go back to," he explained. "If you follow what he says, you will be a leader.
"I'll often recite the first two lines. They (staff) sometimes call me the chief storyteller."
You may think that a storyteller would be out of place in the rough-edged world of construction, but Snook has never been more at home.
The scaffolder's son, who grew Rok from a 7m minnow to stock market heavyweight, has taken his unconventional approach and spread it through the business.
Inside the office, mood lighting, designer arches and an open-plan canteen that resembles the Big Brother house give it a touchy-feely look.
It's not Rok's head office because the firm which styles itself "The Nation's Local Builder" says it doesn't need one. Instead, it's a clue as to the principle on which Snook has built the construction giant. Snook's Rok is made up of 60 local offices in cities and towns across the UK, and intends to reach 100.
"It's a business run by local people and working very locally, so that they really know their customers," said Snook.
"You won't make a mess of your neighbour's property. Our roots are in the way the building sector in the UK was established."
Rok expanded into Yorkshire in 2005 with the acquisition of Lemmeleg, the Wakefield construction business co-founded by Yorkshire
Forward chairman Terry Hodgkinson.
Although the acquisition proved problematic, it didn't stop Rok expanding further, buying Rotherham-based plumbing, plastering and joinery firm EMB Services in February 2007, for an undisclosed sum.
It also bought the construction arm of Malton-based S Harrison Group for 3.2m, in September 2007, and in April 2008, Rok acquired social housing specialist Richardson Projects, working from offices in Rochdale and Leeds. It now employs about 150 people in
the region.
In 2007, it worked on the aftermath of Yorkshire's floods, repairing hundreds of homes in Hull and Sheffield, as well as tackling flood-damaged properties in Gloucestershire.
Snook admitted the dealing with clean-up "stretched us massively". "We didn't cover ourselves in glory in the way we cleared up Hull," he said.
Hundreds of households in Hull had to live in caravans for months while repairs dragged on, as communication between loss adjustors, insurance firms and builders broke down. "We learned, the insurance companies learned and the loss adjustors have learned," he said.
Rok started life in 1939 when a number of smaller businesses amalgamated as Exeter Building Company to take on larger projects being issued by the Government at the start of the Second World War.
EBC progressively expanded through acquisition and
merger over the next 40 years, becoming a major player in the South-West, and was floated on the London Stock Exchange
in 1985.
However, when Snook joined as chief executive in 2000, it was in desperate need of an overhaul. ECB "would have gone bust within two to three years" and Snook decided to take it beyond its traditional geographic boundaries and re-brand it as Rok.
When he proposed the plan to the board of the struggling company, he recalls the deputy chairman turning to the chairman and saying: "I don't know if what he's going to do is going to work. But what we're doing isn't working, so let's let him."
He remembers the day he unveiled the changes to employees gathered in an Exeter University lecture theatre in 2001.
"I was both scared and excited at the same time."
For Snook, who dropped out of his York St John history and drama degree after a couple of terms, the plan had been years in the making.
He'd spent 15 years dreaming up the concept, and used to
walk for miles pondering it. "Why isn't somebody doing this – it must work," he would say to himself. "I just kept coming back to it."
There's something unashamedly corny, but equally united about the company's strategy.
Staff are encouraged to keep a folded card in their wallets that describes the group's strategy in a few simple steps. New staff attend the Taste of Rok induction session to learn its values and culture.
But Snook is communicating these values in the face of the toughest construction downturn for decades.
"When we had a problem last autumn, the organisation is such that I wrote and told everybody what the problem was," he said.
"We sent a text message to everyone in the company asking them to call a number and listen to a message.
"We own the problem collectively. We lost more than six people in six weeks, but people insisted on finishing whatever they were on before they left."
And even after more than 30 years in the industry, Snook has been surprised by the ferocity of the recession.
"In all the jobs I have done in construction, you do pick up a few bruises and knocks along the way," he said. "But I have never experienced anything quite like what we experienced in October.
"We never expected the recession to hit as deeply as it did. In September, we were pretty confident that our sales at the end of 2008 were going to be 1.1bn to 1.15bn. Four weeks later, we knew we were barely going to cover 1bn."
Snook recounts how, late last year, when he was trying to sell his boat, the buyer insisted on having a special clause written into the contract – if Lloyds bank went bust before completion of the sale, the contract would be null and void.
Along with firms up and down the country, Rok saw bank funds dry up overnight. The group was working with a developer on a private and social housing scheme in York.
When the developer approached its bank asking for a 2m facility to allow it to complete the scheme and recoup 8m in sales, the bank refused and it was forced into receivership.
"Those were crazy times," he said. "We lost a considerable amount of money on that."
So does Snook share the optimism of some, who are now grasping at talk of green shoots of recovery?
"There's a long way to go yet," he said. Construction firm Rok styles itself 'The Nation's Local Builder'.
John Collingridge meets chief executive Garvis Snook to discover how construction and poetry go hand in hand.
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