A company that has more than doubled its turnover in a year has received a business award from its local authority.
Panel Supplies of Basildon, Essex won the New Business Award section of the Basildon and District Business Awards and has now gone forward into the Essex Countywide Business Awards 2002.
Since moving to Basildon last year, the company has increased its turnover from £2.7m to a projected £6m this year.
Partner Gary Verrier said: ‘The company is now in its sixth year of trading and originally we operated from a site at Hockley, Essex. However, our growth was so quick that within three years we were being restricted as there was not enough warehouse space.’
The company invested £800,000 in new premises at Basildon which doubled its warehousing and gave it a self-contained yard – and it has not looked back.
Mr Verrier said: ‘The last couple of months have been beyond our wildest dreams. Since moving to Basildon we have been able to buy bigger enabling us to take more orders and gain more sales.’
The company’s workforce has increased from nine to fifteen and its transport fleet from three to six. Panel Supplies services customers over a wide area and offers a vast selection of products from MDF, chipboard and veneers to plywood, birch plywood and melamine. Customers are also diverse, ranging from the reproduction trade to furniture makers and specialist joinery.
Four hundred companies entered the awards this year and 107 went through to the final selection.
The New Business award, sponsored by National Westminster Bank, is based on companies’ growth rate, increase in profitability and general ‘good housekeeping’ in things such as capital investment, cash availability and health and safety policies.
