Contaminated land remediation specialist Sanctus is firmly on the recruitment trail as it looks to put the infrastructure in place to support the continuous growth it has seen since its creation in 2004.
“We’re striving for steady, managed expansion and in the past year we’ve grown by over 50 per cent,” explains Peter Cooke, Managing Director. “Whilst we’re delighted with this progress, it does mean that we need to keep building the team to support the added workload.”
In line with this expansionist strategy Sanctus recently secured a senior appointment in the form of its new Operations Director, Sam Preece, who was previously the Managing Director of the environmental side of AECOM, the largest consultancy in the world. “This is a major coup for us as he was managing hundreds of staff, working on projects across the world before he came here,” adds Mr Cooke. “Sam’s going to be a really valuable addition to the team in terms of his client knowledge and also his experience of working with large organisations.
“Bringing in high calibre individuals is a great way of progressing the business by giving us the necessary tools to manage the additional turnover that we’re now generating. Larger clients have larger projects so we’re needing to take on an ever greater amount of responsibility. Adding high quality personnel with relevant experience is therefore absolutely essential.”
Sanctus’ proactive approach to recruitment really demonstrates its commitment to investing in its people and its infrastructure generally. However, in the current climate, with the skills shortage continuing to blight many sectors, finding the right people with the requisite talents is proving to be challenging. Thankfully Sanctus has been better insulated than most because it has such an enviable staff retention record and capability to provide in house accredited training. “Very few people ever leave us, which is great,” outlines Mr Cooke. “We have a number of staff that have been with us since the very beginning, so are fully immersed in our ethos and our culture. These are in addition to the employees that followed me from my previous companies.
“We’re striving for steady, managed expansion and in the past year we’ve grown by over 50 per cent. Whilst we’re delighted with this progress, it does mean that we need to keep building the team to support the added workload.”
Peter Cooke, Managing Director
“Our long-term staff provide the backbone on which the entire business is built. We invest significantly in training and staff development, mentoring our employees so that they become extremely efficient and effective in their respective roles. The last thing we ever want to do is lose that considerable expertise and have to start again. Staff retention is therefore vitally important to us and we pride ourselves on having an extremely low employee turnover record. Key to this is ensuring that our staff are happy and are well looked after, not only in terms of remuneration but also by offering them other incentives too. We take our staff out on corporate trips to Grand Prix and horse racing events, for example, in addition to organising an annual holiday as well.”
Covering the whole of the UK and Ireland Sanctus’ diverse technical and management team is able to provide a complete suite of services to support the remediation and development of brownfield sites from the initial site investigation through to clean-up to enabling earthworks construction. Reinforcing its strong delivery infrastructure, the company has achieved a plethora of different accreditations including ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and BS OHSAS 18001, as well as CHAS, ConstructionLine, SAFEcontractor and Achilles. With the larger companies expecting this level of accreditation as standard, Sanctus has been able to get its foot in the door with many major clients. In terms of recent projects, it has just finished a project in Aberystwyth for a development that includes new Marks & Spencer and Tesco stores. “The site was previously a gas works and also housed a garage so required extensive remediation. We carried out all the clean-up to make it safe to actually construct the buildings.
“We are also working on a project in Bath for a new casino in the centre of the city. The site had a building that was full of asbestos that we completely removed prior to its demolition. As it’s Bath there were lots of archaeological elements, which again is something we have a great deal of experience in having tackled many similar projects in the past.”
With its wide-ranging expertise covering a number of areas, Sanctus has been well positioned to capitalise on the high volume of work that is currently available. “The market remains very good and we have been able to make the most of it thanks to the attractiveness of our offering. We are very specialist in the sense that we provide lump-sum prices for high risk jobs, which the vast majority of companies won’t do. The reason we do is to give the developer or the client full financial security, which means they know exactly what’s in their budget and that it won’t over-run.”
“With regards to the most fruitful sectors, we’re seeing growth across a diversity of areas, from supermarkets through to commercial, which is performing particularly well at the moment. We have two very large distribution centres up in Bolton, which we’re working on for a new client, that are going very well. We’re also working on a former power station down in Kent and various school projects across the country.”
“’Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’ is a quote attributed to Da Vinci, reportedly adopted by Apple in their early days and currently the ambition of many organisations. Sanctus’ ability to apply a simplified model that eliminates development risks aligns with this aim.”
Sam Preece, Operations Director
The wealth of work opportunities has made it all the more important for Sanctus to continue strengthening its team, particularly as it strives to further broaden its customer base. “We’re focused on picking up larger developers as clients where we work directly for them,” says Mr Cooke. “This provides us with a bit more security and ensures that we’re much more in control of our own destiny.”
With this in mind, Sanctus is now aiming to maintain the positive course it is currently on. “We’re looking for two or three more good quality clients, while consolidating the existing customers that we’re working with. We are continuing to convert more of our work from tenders into negotiated packages where we will basically know we’re going to get the work, which will make it more worthwhile putting all the effort in. In contrast, on tenders we might just be a name on a list of three, five or even ten companies, which may involve a lot of work that comes to nothing.
“We prefer to operate very much on a non-contractual basis where we carry out the work and the client pays us. It makes the process very simple for the client, from looking at a site to remediating it to the point where it can be built upon safely. Increasingly we’ve been providing the whole package encompassing everything from demolition and archaeology through to ground improvements. We de-risk the site because much of the risk on a construction site is in the ground. If we’ve dealt with all the remediation and contamination issues and also the ground issues in terms of the structural elements and ground improvements, the client can get Joe Bloggs Builder to construct a supermarket store, a block of flats or whatever it is they want to build. You never know what you’re going to find in the ground when you start digging.
“We’re also looking for a new office to house the additional staff that we’ll be taking on. Ideally we’d like to get something arranged this year as we are rapidly running out of space at our existing site.”
It is apparent that Sanctus’ approach is clearly in demand. It is little wonder then that the company is working so hard to put the foundations in place to ensure that it is able to continue on the impressive upward growth curve it is currently travelling along.