Kevin Denver gambled on a derelict warehouse in 2003. Twenty years later, it’s one of Burton’s biggest success stories.
I sat down with Kevin Denver at ORS Furniture, and within the first five minutes, he asked me a question that made me laugh. “How long have you got?” he said. “We could make a soap story out of this. It would run every day.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Kevin’s journey didn’t start with office furniture. It started when he was 20 years old on a Prince’s Trust scheme. He became self employed and ran an industrial cleaning business for 10 years. Then, at 31, he stopped. He gave the business he’d built to the two people who’d been doing it with him, and he went to Australia for seven months.
When he came back, he worked for a company called Clubhouse PLC for three and a half years. Clubhouse owned 26 golf courses. One in France, one in Spain, three in Germany and 19 in the UK. Kevin was sales and marketing manager. And every month, his mate Mark Fitzgerald would phone him up and say, “Kev, when you coming in to join me at ORS?”
Mark and his brother had taken over a warehouse. Kevin went to see it before Mark agreed the lease. “My words were, are you mad?” Kevin told me. “The estate hadn’t been used for years. The buildings were neglected. There was no gate. There were no railings. Everyone used to come on the estate. There were trees growing down the walls.”
But Kevin joined him anyway. That was March 2003. They doubled the turnover in the next six months. By September 2003, they made it a limited company. Office Recycling Solutions Limited. Mark said to Kevin, “If you want to stay part of the business, I’ll give you a percentage of the shares over the next three years. Once you’ve completed that, those will be your shares.”
And then it apparently went mad! “It went crazy for the first five years,” Kevin said. “It absolutely blossomed.” from a few hundred thousand turnover to over 3 million.
I asked him why. What accelerated it to such a degree?
“Communication,” he said. “We didn’t have a computer. We didn’t have a website. So the only way we could tell people what we were doing was going knocking on doors, giving out leaflets. If we delivered something to someone on the industrial estate, one person would deliver it, and then the other two would go and drop leaflets while we were there. We made our own leaflets. I don’t even know if we could afford a printer to do them in the old days.”
They had one lady called Maria Freeman who made 220 phone calls every day. That was her job. Five days a week. 220 calls.
“If you did that, you’re not gonna fail, are you?” Kevin said.
And they didn’t just work hard. They worked insane hours. “We’d do clearances at night time. The showroom doors were open during the day, and at night time, we’d go and do the clearances. So we’d work through the night, come back and load the lorries, open the showroom. Some days we worked 72 hours without stopping. That’s what you had to do to make the business survive.”
I asked Kevin if he thinks that level of work ethic is achievable any other way. He paused. “I just think nowadays, we’ve got the internet, haven’t we? So that does help. We didn’t have a platform to sell off before. But my work ethic’s probably no different”
And here’s the thing. Kevin never asks anyone to do something he’s not prepared to do himself. “You lead by example,” he said. “I think everyone appreciated where we were and what we were trying to get to. It was going to be hard work. You’re lifting furniture. It’s heavy, it’s dangerous, it’s hard work. And so many other people don’t want to do it.”
One of the turning points for ORS was a phone call from a guy called Mark Bayless who worked for Care UK. Maria had found him in the Yellow Pages. He asked if they did new furniture as well as used. Kevin said yes. Then Mark said, “I’ve got a little bit of a problem. We’ve got a hospital wing opening in a few weeks time by the health secretary, and the furniture we’ve ordered isn’t going to be here in time. Can you help?”
Kevin said yes. He put the phone down and thought, “I don’t know what I’ve just agreed to, but we’ll find a way.”
They scrambled around. They found some used furniture they could put in there. They got some products made for the front of house that were going to be in the photographic area with all the PR and the grand launch. Royal South Hants Hospital on the south coast. They lent Care UK some furniture whilst everything was being made.
Mark Bayless said, “I’ve got another job. I’ve got a new hospital in Marlborough.” Then Buckingham Gate. Then walk-in centers. “I just built up this relationship with this one guy,” Kevin said. “And 20 years on, they’re still our best customer. One phone call. And the fact that I said yes rather than no. Because when I said yes, I thought, I don’t know what we’re going to do. But we found a way. Because that’s how we’ve always been. Let’s say yes and work out a way.”
Kevin’s wife, Laura, joined the busines after working for a mobile phone sales company doing a million sales calls. When Karl, who’s now a partner in the business, agreed to help Kevin buy out Mark Fitzgerald, they invited Karl round to lunch to say thank you. Karl asked Laura what she wanted to do. She said she loved her job, but joined ORS anyway, and she’s been there ever since.
“We wouldn’t be where we are now if we hadn’t taken on Laura,” Kevin said. “Our staff, you cut them in half and they bleed ORS. Without that mentality, we just wouldn’t be where we are today.”
ORS has never been a high payer on salaries, Kevin admitted. But they’ve always looked after everyone. Everyone gets a performance related bonus. And here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cleaner, a salesperson, a business development manager, admin staff, or a director. If they hit the target at the end of the month, everyone gets the same. It might be £200, £300, but the cleaners get the same as the directors.
“What was the mindset behind this, as it’s quite unorthodox?” I asked.
“Well, without the cleaners, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do,” Kevin said. “Everyone is fair. I think because everyone knows that’s how we operate, that’s why we’ve managed to keep hold of everyone. Everyone knows that sometimes, to make this business succeed, we have to go above and beyond our normal jobs.”
The business rebranded from Office Recycling Solutions to ORS UK because someone asked them one day if it was a shame they’d bought chairs new, because “you don’t do new furniture.” Kevin and Mark realized the name was limiting them. So they rebranded. And now they do both. Pre-loved and and new.
Their first new office furniture manufacturer was Manchester based, Sellar “It was difficult because we we had credit limits, so we’d have to pay for everything,” Kevin said. But they built relationships. They got on the Bisley authorised dealership list, which Kevin compared to having a BMW franchise. “Once we’d started ticking boxes, and once we got an ISO accreditation under our belts, other manufacturers started recognising us.”
Kevin’s approach to pricing is straightforward. “We sell large volumes for small amounts of profit. We’re not greedy.”
Kevin, Laura, Karl and the team have built something remarkable. ORS employs people who’ve been there for over 20 years. They’ve got relationships with customers that have lasted just as long.
And it all started with a phone call, a gamble, and a willingness to say yes and work out the details later.
I left ORS thinking about how many businesses like this are out there. Family businesses that started with nothing, built on graft and phone calls and 72 hour shifts. Businesses where the cleaners get the same bonus as the directors. Where the owner still picks up the phone and asks customers how they’re doing. Where people bleed the company colors because they’ve been treated fairly for 20 years.
Kevin said something that stuck with me. “People come in and ask, what time will you finish? And I say, when I finish.”
That’s the mentality that built ORS and why they’re celebrating 25 years in business on the 30th November!
Visit their website here
