Profile: Mark Nichols

WHEN Mark Nichols left school at 16, father put three career options on the table.

“Become a diamond merchant and you’ll be extremely wealthy, become a master of wine and learn to trade wines, or become an accountant and you’ll never be out of work,” he said to his son.

Nichols decided a career in diamonds and wine was not for him, and took the third option.

Starting out in accountancy, a three-decade career took him to the heights of industry, culminating in an executive position with industrial gases giant BOC, managing 30,000 people.

But today, he’s at the other end of business, running fledgling green brick firm Encos.

“I’ve come from big industry and gone from the sublime to the ridiculous,” he said.

Leeds-based Encos evolved from research developed in 2000 by academics at Leeds and Nottingham universities, who collaborated on using organic binders in construction products.

That developed into a simple but novel process – making bricks from recycled materials and oil, instead of traditional fired clay.

Initially, Encos’ products followed a decidedly unglamorous path: using sewage to create sturdy and odourless bricks. A collaboration with Yorkshire Water followed, including the development of a £200,000 test plant in Leeds.

But while the novel “bowel to trowel” concept earned Encos some eye-catching headlines, Nichols realised homes built from sewage were a step too far.

“Imagine I’m a customer here. ‘Hi, I’m Mark Nichols from Encos and we’re going to use it (vegetable oil) to bind incinerated poo’,” said Nichols.

“You’re asking people to go too far in terms of their risk attitude.

“I said ‘Forget all the excrement stuff; let’s find a material that they will know and understand’. We’re doing other things.”

Its new bricks are made from baked limestone scrapings and rapeseed oil residue. It has teamed up with brick maker S Morris to test commercial production.

The science behind Encos’s patented process is simple, but Nichols believes, unique. The nearest comparison is “the stuff you cannot get off your baking trays”.

“You can get it off with some pretty strong acids, but those acids would cause concrete to fail.”

He’s confirmed its originality with some of the world’s biggest brick firms. “I asked them ‘Have you seen anything else like it in the world?’ They said ‘no’. Nobody else has come up with something comparable.”

Nichols, who “realised very quickly I’m not a construction person, I’m an industrialist”, joined in November 2010 to turn this concept into cash.

Encos’ attempts to make commercial progress coincided with the steepest fall in the construction sector for decades.

“UK consumers quite clearly do not want to pay extra for sustainability but they want it,” said Nichols. “The building materials industry is probably at its worst position in its history in the UK.

“We know as a business we are not in the greatest position to launch a new product.”

But he believes Encobricks and Encoslips can carve a niche with their “huge environmental and power-saving potential”. Its aim is to clad homes with brick slips under the Government’s energy efficiency programme – the Green Deal. It aims to make the country’s 26m households and 4.5m businesses energy efficient, funded by cheap loans.

“In the UK it’s significant enough to create a new market,” he said. “I’m confident that market is emerging.

“We’ve got a number of major players who’ve now started to knock on our door.”

A leading oleochemicals firm, which Nichols won’t name but sounds suspiciously like Goole’s Croda, has approached it with refinery bottoms to use as a binder. Encos also spies opportunities in north west Europe and Australia.

Its bricks have been through 32 tests, including accelerated aging and thermal shock, and are now awaiting approval from construction products body the British Board of Agrément.

“I think we’ve answered all the questions. The demeanour I had was positive scepticism. If I didn’t have the confidence, how could I expect anyone else to?” Nichols believes “if it (Encos’ product) lasts 20 years, it will last 60 years and last 200 years. The chemical reaction in the binder is irreversible”.

Nichols arrives at the offices of Encos’ major backer, stock market-listed IP Group, wearing sturdy boots and jeans. He’s off to Somerset to meet its brick maker.

He splits his time between Encos’ office at Leeds Innovation Centre, IP Group’s office and his home in Surrey. Nichols admits he wouldn’t have joined Encos if it hadn’t been for IP Group.

“I did not necessarily have to do anything, but this opportunity was too good to miss. What stimulated me was the opportunity and the fact that I get to do something with my own two hands.” The investor is the UK’s biggest quoted incubator and developer of university intellectual property, and has tie-ups with 12 of the UK’s most research-intensive universities, including Leeds, York and Oxford, claiming some notable successes.

As Encos gears up for its commercial launch, it has helped assemble a board of experts. And with 1.6bn bricks produced annually in the UK, Nichols believes Encos could be another sizeable success.

“It would not be a small business if we got five per cent of that,” he said. “We’re offering a truly sustainable alternative.”

Brought up in London, he left school at 16 because “I never had the greatest respect for authority”.

His father, James, a runner on the London Stock Exchange, taught Nichols, one of five children, “self-sufficiency and resourcefulness”. His father went on to become one of the City’s leading fund managers.

“My dad taught me that by hard work, a good dose of IQ and emotional intelligence, there’s nothing you cannot do.”

Nichols started out aged 19 as an assistant accountant at Merck & Co, and joined oil and gas giant Total at 25, working with its subsidiaries across the globe.

In his early 30s he was approached by BOC, becoming finance director of its engineering and construction division.

For the next 18 years, he worked his way up through the group, including heading its procurement and running operations across South East Asia.

It culminated with the role of group director of business development, devising strategy for the industrial giant. He left after Linde completed its £8.2bn acquisition of BOC in September 2006. All of this means he amassed an “unusual breadth of experience”. “Hopefully people from my background bring an outside-in view.”

And while the contrast with his past and present career could not be greater, Nichols sees Encos as a business “you might consider small but with great potential”.

Mark Nichols Factfile

Title: Mark Nichols, chief executive, Encos

Date of birth: May 17, 1957

First job: paper round aged nine – my sister picked up the bag for me because I was too young

Last book read: The Family, Martina Cole

Education: Bishop Challoner Grammar School, Shortlands, Bromley

Car driven: Lexus RX 450 hybrid

Holiday destination: Maldives

Favourite music: I love electronica and Genesis

Family: married with four children aged three, five, 24 and 27

Most proud of: Creating the wherewithal to support my family