After recently celebrating 65 years of trading in Sheffield, Hodge Clemco, a supplier and manufacturer of abrasive blasting equipment and abrasives, is set for a full rebranding to SurfacePrep following a buyout three years ago. UnLTD spoke to Louise Cranstone-Spooner, Marketing Manager at SurfacePrep UK, to discuss the history of the business, recent changes and their important green initiatives…
Hi Louise. Can you start by telling me a little bit about who SurfacePrep is?
SurfacePrep started in the US and acquired lots of other companies within the surface preparation industry. In the US, they have about 50 companies under the SurfacePrep umbrella. They’re also in Canada, but here in the UK, about three years ago, they bought Sheffield’s Hodge Clemco, which is where we are now, alongside companies in Manchester, Washington and Birmingham. Over the last two years, it’s been about building it all and now it’s about rebranding all the companies to SurfacePrep.
Hodge Clemco has been long established in Sheffield. Can you give us a little bit of the company’s history?
Hodge Clemco started in 1959, and it was originally based across the road before eventually moving here. They started out doing what they do now, which is essentially manufacturing blasting equipment. We don’t do any blasting, so we wouldn’t come on-site and do your blasting for you, but we will give you everything to be able to do that; from the machine to the abrasive, to the training and servicing, we’d give you everything you need to complete that process.
What has changed for the business since SurfacePrep took over?
Not much, in terms of what we do. Prior to being bought out by SurfacePrep three years ago, Hodge was part of a different group of companies.
When SurfacePrep bought Hodge as an abrasive blasting manufacturing company, they also bought a blasting equipment hire company and two other companies that were mainly powder and paint solutions; spray booths, powder coating systems, conveyor systems, so anything to do with that side of the business. What they’ve got in the UK now is a full surface preparation through to surface finishing operation.
The slogan that we have here in the UK is a total service solution provider so we can do everything in this big loop for all those three areas, from you buying it, servicing it, maintaining it, refurbishing it, to recycling and starting again.
For the uninitiated, can you explain what abrasive blasting is.
Abrasive blasting can be used for two purposes: either to remove something from a surface like paint or any other coating, or you can do it to create a surface finish that you might want, so it can be used for aesthetic purposes, or it can be to remove.
The other thing you can do is finish the surface to a certain grade. If you were painting something again, you might need it to a certain level and finish to be able to apply the coat you want on top.
People often refer to it as sandblasting, but you shouldn’t because if you blast with sand, it can give you silicosis, so it’s actually been illegal to blast with sand since the 1950s.
Instead, abrasives are used, and here in Sheffield, we also sell a whole range of abrasives. If you get to a roundabout and you see the red grip strips, that’s our abrasive that goes into that, or we’ll sell it to customers to put in resin so you can put it on a resin drive, and things like that.
The machines you sell are for the purposes of abrasive blasting. What sort of clients are you selling to?
It can be anything really. You get people from a guy in his shed to large, well-known companies that you would have heard of. It could be something as big as taking the surface down on an aeroplane, to some guy who’s blasting his car door that he’s renovating.
There are lots of different variations of what we sell, from large blast rooms to cabinets and portable blast machines, a lot of the machines are manufactured on-site, in Sheffield.
What’s the main selling point for you compared to competitors?
The main selling point for us is that we’re a total service solution provider, and that we can do everything for you enabling us to deliver results beyond the surface.
How many people do you employ?
Throughout the whole of the UK, it’s around 100 people. In Sheffield, it’s around 70, so the majority of the company in the UK is based in Sheffield. There’s either a contingency who’ve been here forever, or there’s a few of us who’ve been here a couple of years. But that’s mainly because people have retired from the business.
There’s a guy who’s due to retire at Christmas, and he’s been here 36 years. He was the Managing Director and he’s looking forward to his retirement now. There’s a lot of people like that.
Why do you think that is?
It’s not a family company, because it’s run by an American company, but it has that kind of feel. For me, and I’ve been here two years, everyone was so friendly when I joined. You go around to get introduced to these people who have been here for 20 or 30 years and you’re like, what?
Because you don’t hear that anymore?
The reason that a lot of us have come in is either because of the development of the company or to replace somebody who’s been here a long time and is retiring. But it does have a nice, friendly feel about the place.
It doesn’t matter what your problem is, you can go to anyone, and if they know about it, they’ll help you. If they don’t, they’ll point you to the person who does. It’s like a little community people have been really supportive. I’m enjoying it. I love it here.
How have the changes introduced by SurfacePrep gone down with the people who have been there for so long?
As you’d probably expect, there was some getting used to it, but I think we’re getting to a point now where everybody genuinely is relaxed, and they’re on board now. You can see a lot more cohesion between the four businesses.
It benefits us because it gives the business in the UK the whole scope of the surface preparation and finishing industry rather than just being one area of it in Sheffield. That’s also better for the customer as we’re getting the teams from across the country working together on quotes for customers.
Aside from the blending of the four businesses under one banner, what other changes have been implemented?
One of the big things that we’ve started doing is really looking at ways we can recycle the abrasives and stop them from going to landfill. We can collect pretty much any abrasive that we sell and take it to a recycling centre, where they will repurpose it and recycle it back out. As long as it doesn’t contain any contaminant or hazardous stuff, they can recycle it and we can put it into other products.
It’s becoming a big thing as it saves companies money because if they sent that abrasive to landfill, there’s a fee, whereas they’re incentivized to recycle, so there is a benefit for the company as well as for the environment.
