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A Message From ROD BENHAM - 20 years
June 6th - What happened on this day in history?
1716 The first slaves arrive in Louisiana
1882 Cyclone in the Arabian Sea (Bombay, India) drowns 100,000
1914 First air flight out of sight of land (Scotland to Norway)
1944 Operation Neptune, D-Day: 150,000 Allied Expeditionary Force lands in Normandy, France
1975 British voters decide to remain in the Common Market
1997 Dawsongroup plc acquires Portable Cold Storage Ltd
The latter hardly compares in significance to the D-Day landings although is in the history of DRTCS.
Dawsongroup only started in the Portable Cold Storage sector in 1990, building just 6 units in that first year as they introduced the ‘purpose built coldstore’ into a market dominated by ex-Refrigerated Sea Containers of which PCS was a supplier. Dawsongroup’s target market were ‘blue chip’ companies in the food sector and their success resulted in PCS responding by building purpose built coldstores for the UK market and in 1997 Dawsongroup acquired the PCS UK & European businesses, but not Portable Cold Storage Inc. operating out of New Jersey in the United States. The new business made its base at the existing PCS site where we remain today.
A lot has changed in those 20 years. In 1997 both businesses could be described as rental operations yet today a solutions provider perhaps best described as a hybrid offering project management, consultancy and rental. I would say the real transformation started around 15 years ago with the decisions made in the first half of that period the driver of the successes in the current decade. A lot of us have been together throughout this period, 46 or 43.4% of our team have been us for more than 10 years, so probably haven’t appreciated the scale of change as it happened and we still have 10 employees from the time of the acquisition. Simon Babe and David Quinn, who were with Dawsonrentals and Geoff Allen, Andy Bramley, Sarah Bust, Steve Emery, Dave Fottles, Mike Simpkin, Mark Stafford and Andy Williams although Andy was employed by Don-Bur after the acquisition.
My personal highlights over the years are probably;
2000 Bringing the Bodyshop back in-house. On acquisition it had subcontracted to Don-Bur.
2001 The first complex at a Safeway store which utilised the PCS Refrigerated Container fleet.
2002 Walking away from the Tesco Christmas business. I believe one of my better decisions.
2004 First major production process installation being the PIR 23 unit complex at Bartholdi.
2011 The Kettleby Foods construction build that no doubt we were a player at that level.
So I’ll finish with expressing my personal thanks to all those who have been with us on this journey.
Rod
in WW1