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From modest beginnings 24 years ago, Garic has grown to become a major player, largely off the back of its own ingenuity. CJ finds out more.
Nesting beside the M66 just outside Bury, Lancashire, is the all-new, purpose-built base for specialist plant hirer and manufacturing company Garic. Set on the site of a former bleach works, the new building houses 10 work bays fronted by two-storey offices. In a couple of years the building will be partially powered by electricity generated from waterwheels, one of which will be installed in the spot vacated by the waterwheel that once powered the bleach works.
According to general manager Paul Massey, consolidating Garic's existing three depots into the new 4ha site has allowed production to rise by 70%, and is the culmination of five years of planning. It is also the latest chapter in a story that began in 1983, when two brothers Gary and Lome Entwistle and their father Eric started the business by rebuilding a dismantled JCB 3C backhoe and using it on sewer replacement contracts in the north Manchester area. As the work built up, the fleet of excavators and bowsers slowly increased and Garic could have become one of dozens, or even hundreds, of family-run plant hirers dotted up and down the country - but no.
In the late '80s, the excavator fleet was sold and Garic became a specialist hirer for the bowsers the brothers manufactured at the family farm. In 1989, a request for an environmentally secure fuel bowser from Birse Construction for a job at Connahs Quay Power Station in north Wales saw the production of Garic's first bunded bowser. "Garic very quickly became the first name in bowser and tanker rental," says Massey, who joined the company in 1995 as a fabrication engineer.
Innovation and inventiveness saw the company awarded two patents in the late 1990s. The first was for an Interceptor Drip Tray that retains fuel and oil but discharges water. This is still in production, and a recently signed deal will see Garic's products, including the drip tray, introduced into Speedy's range.
The second patent was for the Enviro-Wash, a wheel wash system based on an existing machine that had been redesigned to remove the inherent...