WET News

leaders 2017 9 they're supported by a big organisation. There's competition between them as well, and that's great, and there's a lot of sharing of ideas." Stonor says what this structure has meant is that Stonbury's growth in the past year may have been huge "but walk- ing around the company it hasn't felt like that because you're dealing with it in packages". He explains: "The team that works for Yorkshire Water or UU might have grown £1.5M to £2M and might have a few new staff members, and that's what they see. Nothing mega. By breaking it down and dealing with it in regions the growth has been a lot more manageable." With Stonbury having seen such tre- mendous and seemingly rapid growth in the business it must be hard to get car- ried away with that and perhaps go faster than is sustainable. Not all, says Stonor. "Well, I've got Northern blood so I'm pretty tight," he laughs before getting serious again. "Number one, what we've done is work really hard to put in financial founda- tions. What we've said as a group… I don't run this group as a dictator. What we say is we've for power of 170 brains and our culture is to say 'we only employ people for careers and we as a company only want to fulfil any aspiration you have whether it's a job for life or you want to go through the management chain'. "We're not doing this just because we're nice as a company, but it's a power- ful tool to drive us forward." Stonor says his job is to "control the horse with the reins than have to kick a horse to go forward. Wouldn't it be terri- ble if we had this really bit opportunity and we couldn't afford to do it? We've been very careful. "We've planned for this. It doesn't scare us. It's not really about turnover. It's not really the game. What we want to do is to make sure that we took every opportunity we had and enjoyed doing it." The company is also turning its atten- tion towards AMP7, and Stonor says he is seeing frame- works that are crossing over AMP periods, and water com- panies doing more to spready programmes of work. "We've seen far more visibility ahead and that doesn't stop at the end of AMP6." Stonor says the industry is used to seeing visibility stop at the end of the AMP but he senses there will less disrup- tion with the transition to James Stonor, Stonbury's managing director The LeADeRS 2017 THE NUMBERS 13/14 14/15 15/16 % cHaNgE Sales £M 12.5 12.7 16.8 33 Gross profit £M 3.6 4.5 5.8 29 Operating profit £M 0.4 1.4 2.4 67 Pre-tax profit £M 0.4 1.4 2.4 69 Staff 77 75 111 48 Net assets £M 1.0 0.7 1.8 174 THE RaTIOS 13/14 14/15 15/16 % cHaNgE 5yr aVE. Return on capital % 36.5 214.7 132.1 -38 93.8 Gross margin % 28.8 35.3 34.2 -3 29.3 Operating margin % 3.3 11.4 14.4 26 7.6 Net margin % 3.1 11.3 14.4 27 7.5 Sales/employee £K 161.9 168.8 151.5 -10 200.3 AMP7. And he does sympathise with the water companies, saying that some are doing all they can. "But the buck stops with the fact that the AMP cycle needs looking at and changing. As a water com- pany you cannot expect to resource your- self in year five to plan for the next year or year four." He expects to see a levelling off of pro- ductivity in year five of the current AMP cycle but "that's because we're growing. Stonor feels it's all talk at the moment about how the end of AMP6 will pan out. "There's not enough evidence for me to sit here and say 'yes, I'm really confident that the crossover will be good'. In terms of what the plans are for AMP7, though, I think they're looking really promising."

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