Russ Stilwell: “Be true to your values”

Russell Stillwell’s story is unique in this collection; he started out in his chosen career path early. He began his apprenticeship to train as an electrician following his work experience at school, aged 14 (albeit he completed his GCSEs). He found his pathway from a young age and stuck to it by being given an amazing opportunity and start in life by his then boss and family friend, Cliff Longman.

Russell qualified, worked hard and progressed to qualification as an electrician aged 19. He decided to start finding his own private work, opening doors of opportunity through word of mouth and leading to the establishment of a private client base. This client base would eventually form the basis for Russell starting his first business, RS Electrical Contractor Ltd.

Initially, although only providing electrical services, Russell’s customers liked the way he operated so much that he got regular requests to find other services that offered the same high quality results. Over the years, Russell has put together a team of experts and now has a strong in-house team offering:

• electrical services
• mechanical services
• energy efficiency
• design and management

The team are dedicated to providing solutions within the construction and facilities management industry that deliver a combination of excellence and value. They hold themselves accountable for working to high professional and personal standards whilst always looking to raise the bar.

Hi, Russ. Can you tell us a bit more about your journey and that of the business, particularly around the personal growth that enabled you to get to where you are today.

My journey starts from the age of 14, having done work experience with a local company called Longman Electrical Contractors. I was not engaged at school and was only passionate about certain lessons with a lacking in career direction. Having been given two weeks’ work experience at Ilford swimming pool, it was my intention to bunk off my work experience. One day I made this clear to a great man called Cliff Longman (dad to a close school friend) – the rest was history!

So, Cliff Longman gave me two weeks’ work experience on some domestic rewires and within that time I remember learning what appeared to be so much in a short space of time. At the end of it I wasn’t expecting any money. At the time I did a milk round and got about £8 for a Saturday morning’s work. I received unexpected payment at the end of the two weeks. I got £100. This changed my view on life; money for doing something I loved for someone I really respected and looked up to. A decision was made very quickly. That was what I wanted to do – I wanted to be an electrician and nothing was going to stop me. I could’ve been good at school if I applied myself, but having had such a compelling work experience both inspired and helped me from a young age to find a career path, combining practical development with a subject that I wanted to learn. So, Cliff took me under his wing and I started a very, very early apprenticeship at the age of 14 as well as officially still being at school.

When I came to leave school and was already one and a half years into what I was going to be doing, we then got to the stage where we had to set up my day release at college. So, I worked four days and went to college one day. I did that with Longman Electrical Contractors and completed what was my electrical apprenticeship.

You must have been very young to have that qualification.

I was quite young, I was 19. I remember being young and thinking ‘I can do this,’ but was also quite apprehensive of having responsibility. At 21 I was looking after small sites with the responsibility of delivering the work and had apprentices working under me. In those days Cliff was very much a role model to me so I looked up to him; his ways were my ways. I very much overhauled my demeanour, my personality. He brought me out of me. That set very strong foundations for where I am today.

Cliff saw something very special in you.

I think so, but when you’re young you make the mistake of wanting things too quickly and you suddenly find out through talking to friends and going down the pub what you could earn, and I actually made the big mistake of letting that get into my head. At the age of 20 I spread my wings and said to Cliff that I’d been offered something else and I wanted to go. I think there was disappointment there from both him and his brother Keith’s perspective, but I had made my mind up to go and do it. I think they knew I would always be back; they weren’t wrong! I can remember a ‘talk’ from him about having to go and spread my wings, but to remember that the door is always open. I got a taster of how tough the world can be.

I went and worked for a company who were doing a big estate in Barking and, because I’d been running sites for a couple of years then, I was given the responsibility of looking after the electrical installations on that site. At 21 I had guys working under me who were 40 years old plus. I suppose I did well. I delivered the work and I delivered it with the passion and integrity that I was always taught to deliver with, but I was inexperienced and games were played within the company I was working with. I soon then realised ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’ and I went back to Longmans. I had a year and a half away before I went back there. I suppose in doing that, it then developed me as it should have done, becoming more streetwise. I then worked on some bigger commercial projects, really getting the chance to fly at the work I was doing and get on in life earning good money as a sub-contractor in price work.

So, that was all going well until a time when, whilst working on a site in Tonbridge, I tripped up a set of stairs and unfortunately, as there wasn’t a temporary stair rail, I fell through the stairs and landed two landings below straight on my coccyx. So, I was then in hospital for a period and had damaged all the soft tissues in the base of my spine. Luckily I didn’t break it. When I’d gone back to Cliff I was self-employed so it was a bit stressful not earning whilst I was ill. At the same time in my personal life I had a break-up with my partner so I decided to go away and take some time out and went to Cyprus for six months running a bar which developed a really strong following. Doing everything for myself, with very little money for that period really grounded me.

What happened after Cyprus?

I then came home and went back to working with Cliff straight away, but it was different. I was different. I wasn’t the same person and things had changed at LEC. I wasn’t stimulated with my safe career path as I learned to live on hardly any money in Cyprus and found out that passion could make good things happen, as it did with the bar I was working in over there. I made my mind up and took the decision to start getting my own work which started with me doing a little bit of call-out work for a conservatory company as well as furnishing existing clients, friends and family. I opened a sole trader account as RS Electrical and the order book started to grow.

When was that, roughly?

That would have been 2003.

And that was the birth of what is now RSE Building Services…

Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t think that at the time. I just thought it would be a side-line and that I’d get a little bit of work. I was hopelessly naïve then, Angela. I didn’t know what Excel was and I didn’t have a laptop. I just about had a cash card, I didn’t even have a debit card. Everything was dealt in cash and I was very basic in the way that I did things. So, I was still working for Cliff when I met my wife Deb as well as doing private work. I then had a difficult situation; a subsidiary company of one of the companies that Longman Electrical Contractors used to work for offered me work direct. I immediately thought that I couldn’t do it because of the conflict with Cliff’s company. However, this guy went out of his way to prove that the work wasn’t connected and that he had a lot of work that he wanted to offer me personally. So, I went with it and took the decision to start taking that work on. I was up-front with Cliff and Longmans in telling them what I’d done, but it didn’t go down very well at all.

It sounds like alarms bells were ringing from the outset and that, although you were up-front about it, things weren’t as they seemed.

The work was great and there was loads of it, but it was the relationship side and what I started to feel. I was starting to feel quite guilty. However, with the new work the business really grew. I was doing three or four re-wires a week and I’d taken one apprentice on to assist with the conservatory work. Working long hours and trying to do it all myself, with the excellent support of Deb. One of the builders who I was working with did all of the refurbishment work on hotels in London and he wanted me to start doing work for him as well. He saw what I did, how I did it and how thorough we were and he wanted me to start working in the Berkeley and Westbury Hotels. So, I started doing little bits in both hotels with him until such time that we got offered a very big contract which was the renewal of sub mains in the Berkeley Hotel. At the same time as that was happening, there was 240 rooms to be refurbished in the Westbury hotel. Things were definitely on the up!

It was suddenly very big and it was very daunting. I had Sev who still works for me now. I felt confident that I could deliver, albeit this was nothing like I’d ever taken on before. It shows how naïve in business I really was. I was purely an electrician that had just started his own little company and grew something. I took on both those contracts and delivered them without even a care in the world or thought in the world for limiting my risks. I did them as a sole trader and that year I turned over £470,000. If anything had gone wrong I would have been totally personally liable. Looking back at that I can’t believe what I was thinking, but I wasn’t thinking, just letting passion and excitement lead the way; that’s the reality of it. Our accountants at the time advised us in 2005 to becoming a limited company. Maybe I should’ve realised this earlier as we were taking extreme risks turning over so much money as a sole trader. Once realising this for myself we changed over to a limited company in 2005/6 and at that time we were doing work for new-build developers and local authorities. It grew very, very quickly, in a very short space of time.

Earlier you talked about your passion, integrity and the personal side. It sounds like those things were instrumental in your ability to deliver and build trusting relationships.

I think so. As it went on, one of the things that became recognisable was that my ability was what started it, but it wasn’t my business acumen that got us to where we are today, it was purely passion and personality. We moved and came to Billericay from Wanstead and after realising that we didn’t have the room within our (growing) family home to accommodate the business, we decided to take a lease on our first premises in Laindon.

What sort of turnover were you making then?

When we took that lease on we were turning over £750,000 in 2007. We actually decided to take it in April 2007 and that was a committal of £15,000 a year for five years under a full repairing lease.

That was a big step. What was the point when you thought ‘right, OK, we’re doing this?’

We’d been thinking about it for a while and there was a belief that the way the work was coming through the door at the time, we could do something and the business had the ability to go somewhere. I was young, there was money in the bank, we were getting paid regularly and were making sustainable profit margins. It was seen as an investment I suppose. We thought, we’ve come this far, let’s go for it.

We then started to try and look for managers and get people to assist in the office. My management inexperience in running a business started to come through and recruiting was difficult. I remember us going in there and refurbishing the office. The work was still coming in, but Lehman Brothers went down, then NatWest, and the recession was plastered all over the news. We’d just used up all of our reserves to get the place to look how we needed it to. I’d made a big pension contribution that I regretted and by the September of that year I was fighting a battle to survive and it was a big one as well.

We then took on a big Council contract and that was a £1 million contract. We took the decision to nurture one egg and just focus on that purely. Still, a significant thing happened that would have a lasting impact on the business. A young lady joined our company called Elouise Eagling (who is now operations manager for the business) as an admin assistant. Her manager then left and I remember a conversation between myself and Elouise where I’m saying to her “Are you able to do this? Do you understand it?” To be fair to her, she was 19 then and she just grabbed it with both hands and ran with it. But being thrown in the deep end enabled Elouise to thrive and grow.

Then we got hit hard with a company going bust on us. Losing £150,000 was a real test on business survival. We still had work and we still had a great team so we ploughed on. The quality was out there from a work perspective, but we were struggling to pay suppliers. However, communication and honesty was the way forward.

Do you remember any light bulb moments following such a hard lesson?

The business went backwards slightly. I had to make people redundant and then pick it all up myself. Things were very tight; we had to ask the guys to take a pay cut. There were some significant things we had to do then to make things work, including getting rid of our existing accountants and taking on a new accountant who, without a doubt, made a difference, in me and the way we were doing things in the business. The best thing I did with this situation hanging over my company was communicate honestly and clearly to our employees and supply chain whilst maintaining what had to be a flawless service to our clients.

What would you say was the key learning for you?

My old accountants were just accountants. They gave little business advice and I decided to seek a practice offering business growth attributes. Our then new accountant, Richard Tufnell, could see what we were capable of and demonstrated a level of understanding and passion towards us that blew the previous ones away. He taught me how to do business. He came to see me each week with the accounts and I focused on getting the work done. Then we started to come out the other side. We had the ability from within the business to deliver. I’d grown in ability and skill-set without knowing or realising the extent. We had a brand that our clients bought simply because we delivered what we promised, on a broad spectrum and always to a high standard.

How were you different in terms of the industry standard?

I suppose the biggest thing was our attention to detail and finish; snag-less, pristine work. The smallest error would be picked up on, not only by me, but by the teams themselves as well. We then won a big project which was worth £1 million over a seven month timespan, installing a new generator set for a global commodity dealer. Now we were really going to be tested!

When was this?

We’re at 2011/2. We had just delivered our first £1 million pound Mechanical and Electrical project successfully!

What was your turnover at that point?

£1.5-2 million. Then, just shortly after that in 2013, I engaged an expert in growing my skills in managing and leading the business.

What key areas of personal growth did you uncover?

I’m certainly calmer which is a good thing. I’m now in control, have good self-awareness and a greater awareness of other people as well. The tools that I’ve worked with and embraced for benefit in the business have been fundamental to me personally as well. When I think back to 2003, I’m now an improved person with additional skill sets. It’s nice to get that feedback from people who know me well.

What specifics within you and the business do you see as key to the next phase?

Sustaining our high growth achieved last year of £5 million turnover, but ensuring the right profit is made. To look carefully at the business, with the learning point being that the most or biggest isn’t always best. It’s about quality, not quantity. I’ve always known that and I took for granted how good RSE’s qualities were last year and assumed that they would be easily and quickly taught to and learned by new people coming into the business. This didn’t work because values are learned by working and living within a culture over time. Expecting these to be embraced too quickly will result in a variance in values meaning a variance in quality and client satisfaction!

Recognising that when you want to grow your business, quality is what makes it viable for the long term. Also that beyond a certain size, quality cannot keep coming directly from you, but has to be delivered by others.

Yes. I think if you take me out of the equation you’ve just got a business that works and functions. I have a good team, a lot of risks get mitigated through my experiences over the years. You can’t buy that and you can’t just teach it, but I have to share as much as possible with the team so they can do even more for themselves.

If you had to share one aspect of your personal learning that you feel would benefit others, what would it be?

There are a few, but the first one that’s been key to my growth is humility. From my favourite poem If by Rudyard Kipling, “If you can walk with kings, but never lose the common touch” – keep your feet firmly on the ground. If I hadn’t have learnt to have done that, I don’t think we’d be here today.

What would the second one be?

To ensure the company values are out there and known. Do all that you can to live them to the full yourself and ensure that your team live them the way you do too.

If you were hopping on a plane and had 30 seconds, what one more bit of advice would you share?

Love what you do and communicate clearly. Never forget life’s journeys. Let that be the creator of your values so that it is those values that influence the culture of your thoughts and actions. Who you are being at any given moment in time will influence what you do and how you do it!

And what do you notice about what’s going on around you?

Post-recession demand in the construction sector is so high that there is a shortage of available labour with the right skills. The new technology in 3D building information modelling (BIM) means that much more planning and risk management can be done up-front in the design of a building project. This reduces the time and cost downstream both in terms of manpower needed in the construction stage with fewer unforeseen risks coming to fruition.

With BIM, you can then also model how the finished building will operate and plan up-front for efficiencies to reduce the ongoing running and maintenance costs of the building once complete. The face of UK construction is changing in line with what’s already in place in other countries such as America. RSE Building Services are leaders in this new world and we’ve already invested in the essential technology and development to achieve this. You need to keep ahead of the majority and be flexible.

So, don’t get complacent and know what’s happening in your market place…

Yes, exactly.

Thank you very much, Russ.

In brief

Set strong foundations for where you want your business to go, but don’t make the mistake of wanting too much too soon; good things come to those who wait. When you start out in business, the world can be a very tough place and sometimes even the best of opportunities aren’t as good as they seem. Sometimes it’s better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

If you start out as a sole trader be careful of your liabilities if things go wrong. Mistakes on big jobs could be very costly and you could lose the roof over your own head so get a good accountant who will advise you properly on the correct decisions for you and your business.

Even when you least expect it the economy can cause you major problems. Be careful of your reserves and be sure to have enough for a rainy day because sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards in the long term.

It is vital to grow your own skills in managing and leading the business. If you can, try and enlist the help of an expert to do this, who can equip you with the right tools to do it effectively. This will enable you to share as much as you can with your team and enable them to flourish, allowing you to move from managing to leading. You have to let go to let the business grow.

The company values are vital and it is important that they are shared freely amongst all staff members so that everybody can embrace and live them. This will ensure that all customers get the very best service possible. Remember that quality is much more important than quantity and will enable you to leave every job with a satisfied customer ready to give you more work and recommend you to others.

Always pay attention to what you’re doing. Look hard at what’s going on around you, what’s going on in your mind and your values every day to make sure that it’s all aligned. Don’t get complacent; keep up with what’s happening in your market place.