Fuel Oil News August 2018 | Page 16

In Conversation Continued from page 15 price, but sometimes we just have to say we can’t do it that low and accept we’ll lose the business. Fortunately, the Campbell Energy side of the business is consistently performing very well, which means there is less pressure to cut our fuel prices or have our trucks running all the time. On the filling station side; 10 years from now I envisage the site eventually becoming a self-serve, pay-at-pump style set up, probably with electric vehicle charging points. We might use the area to build a row of retail units to rent out. As we produce our own electricity, we could offer prospective companies very attractive rates. The whole package Offering the whole package with value-added bolt-ons – from sales and installation to maintenance and replacement – helps us retain our customers for the long term and 16 Fuel Oil News | August 2018 gives us much greater control of reliability. A team of three installers cover Kilmarnock and Paisley doing around two/three tank installations of Atlas oil tanks each week. A team of three engineers provides boiler and tank maintenance. We service a good percentage of our own customers’ tanks with engineers available Monday to Saturday for boiler breakdowns; 90% of calls are dealt with on the same day. Our partnership with Phillips 66 spans the full 50 years which is testament to the fact that they are a very easy company to deal with. People deal with people and if you like the people you are dealing with, you stick with them! As the phrase goes, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and in all these years Phillips 66 has never let us down. And the reason for Campbell Fuels’ success and longevity over the past five decades? Being a family-run business and keeping our finger on the pulse! Campbell Energy now has a biomass plant with the company having installed about 50 woodchip boilers to date