Things have certainly not been easy since Sally Wray decided – almost on a whim – to buy a tool rental company, but she’s learned to roll with the punches, writes Sam Hawcroft
Sally Wray had always harboured entrepreneurial ambitions – but it took her a long time to realise them.
As it does with many people, the attraction of a secure, though unspectacular, position, kept her from taking the plunge and going it alone, yet she was to find that it was very much a case of better late than never.
Sally began her career as a legal assistant at Hull City Council. “It was almost like being a paralegal, but without the qualification,” she says. “I never really got the opportunity to do the qualification, and to be honest, when I first went into it I thought it’d be really glamorous… a bit like it is on the telly!”
It turned out to be anything but. There was little room for creativity or progression, but Sally stuck with it for just over a decade because of the security the job gave her. “The council does look after you – you get a good package,” she acknowledges. But after she had two of her three children, she went part-time – which, Sally says, proved to be the beginning of the end of her time at the council.
“I found I had less and less to do, because being part-time meant others were taking the work that I had while I was not there.”
Then the authority made a round of cuts and Sally was among those who were offered voluntary redundancy. “I took it, and my redundancy package was about £9,000. I vowed that I would turn it into a million! So I spent a bit of time at home to have a think and figure out exactly what it was that I wanted to do.”
Her husband Gav was working in the oil and gas industry at the time, which gave Sally a bit of time and space to ponder her next steps – but nevertheless, even though she had the relative luxury of being able to sit at home and do nothing, this was the last thing she wanted to do. She needed to “keep her brain ticking”, so took a casual job in adult education as a learning mentor at East Riding Council.
This was in 2012, which wasn’t a great year for the British economy (but, in hindsight, positively rosy compared with now). “The majority of people coming in were men in their 50s who had been in work all their lives, and they weren’t very happy because the jobcentre was sending them to me and telling them they needed to do English, maths and IT, which they called ‘functional skills’. I can’t think of a more patronising term for people who have worked and been successful all their lives, and then find themselves out of a job through no fault of their own, to come and be told to do ‘functional skills’.”
Sally suggested to her manager that they think about ways to help individuals get back into work; she thought the council could be innovative and set up a not-for-profit recruitment company. However, she was told “quite abruptly” that wasn’t what they were paid for.
She felt the same kind of disillusionment that she’d experienced working for legal services, frustrated yet again by the lack of opportunity for innovation and creativity. And then a comment from one of her daughters stopped her in her tracks.
It was around the time Prince William married Kate Middleton, Sally says, and she’d been explaining to her children that marrying a “commoner” was a relatively modern thing.
“We’d been reading Cinderella and all those sorts of stories and my middle daughter was sitting on the bed. I could see there was a question brewing. She just said, ‘But when did Prince William rescue her?’ Then my eldest said, ‘You don’t need a man to rescue you. Sometimes you just have to rescue yourself.’”
Out of the mouths of babes, indeed. Sally went to bed with those words ringing in her ears. “Sometimes you just have to rescue yourself… sometimes you just have to rescue yourself…”
“It was going over and over, and I made a decision. I thought, right, I’m going to change things now.”
She didn’t really know what she was looking for, but she knew she wasn’t looking for another job. “I wanted autonomy – so that if I had an idea, I wouldn’t have anybody telling me I couldn’t do it. I wanted freedom.”
It would be many months (and a fair way into that £9,000) before she came across a tool and plant hire company for sale. “I remember my husband coming home and I told him, ‘I’ve got this really good idea. If we remortgage the house, I think we could have a chance. We might be able to do it.’ And he was just like… what on earth are you talking about?”
Sally puts it down to a gut feeling that she can’t quite explain. “When I first walked in it was kind of a backstreet, spit and sawdust, run-down industrial estate with a tin roof. I just thought, ‘Oh, I love it – it’s brilliant.’ But it wasn’t brilliant. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what was going on in my mind. It was the power of naivety at play, really strongly.”
She stuck to her guns, took legal advice, agreed the price and everything began to fall into place. On first meeting the staff, though, the enormity of what she’d done began to sink in. “By that stage it was too late to start having doubts. I was already too far in to walk out. Not that I wanted to, really, I still believed in what I was doing – but it was just so daunting and frightening that the ‘fight or flight’ kicked in.”
Being a relatively young woman in a male-dominated environment was also extremely challenging.
“I’ve had people come in and say, ‘Hiya, love – is your dad about?’ I could write a book on the comments and conversations I’ve had with men, and how I’ve been treated by men. The three staff were all men, and all older than me. I very much felt like I needed them more than they needed me, and they ran rings around me. It was a really difficult period. But I didn’t have a choice, I just had to make it work.”
To do this, she quickly realised that the company needed to move premises if it was to improve its professional image and customer base, and along with that came a name change.
Relaunching as GoHire was a risk, as the previous company had a certain amount of history attached to it, but Sally felt the brand needed to be more dynamic and help drive the growth she was intent on achieving.
She spent the first months “wearing all the hats”, working all hours, until she reached a stage where she knew she had to take another member of staff on to lighten the load. This proved the catalyst for an “upward trajectory” that enabled the company to take on a driver and a hire controller.
They also reached a point where they needed more storage for their equipment – but, rather than just renting some units, Sally decided to buy a premises and put the GoHire name on it. She found an ideal place in Chamberlain Road, which would expand the company’s presence into east Hull – but Covid put a major spanner in the works and the sale took well over six months to complete.
During 2020, a call came out of the blue asking Sally if she’d be interested in buying a tool hire firm in Grimsby. “I’d identified that as being our next location, and I thought, well, the timing’s not great, but what an opportunity. It was like it was meant to be. We completed on the east Hull branch on October 30, having bought the Grimsby firm on October 1. So, as we got into November, suddenly, my whole world had shifted because I wasn’t prepared for the busyness and how difficult it would be to manage three places in one go.”
Sally is one of those people who finds it difficult not to work – and there have certainly been ups and downs along the way. “I really do enjoy my job, and I’m really ambitious. I’m keen to keep growing for as long as I’m enjoying it. There are really high highs as well as really low lows – it’s about learning to roll with it. I always try to be professional, do the right thing, and not compromise on my integrity – because that’s the one thing no one can take from me. But it’s my business and I know challenging times come with the territory.”
The nature of the tool-hire industry is in itself fairly turbulent. “It’s a bit of a money pit,” says Sally. “You’ve got to spend a lot of money before you start seeing a return on it. Everything is a long-term game, you’ve got to manage your stock really carefully and at times you have to create value out of nothing.”
Rising interest rates mean housebuilding has slowed down, which in turn has an impact on demand for tools, and consumers are being more careful with their cash, too. But one constant is GoHire’s attention to customer service. “We’re a relationship business that just happens to do tool hire. We really do care, and I think that’s where we have been able to be a bit disruptive. It’s a saturated market, and the majority of our competitors are multi-branch nationals with seemingly endless resources, people and power. But local independents tend to work really well together, and we realise that we need to do this so we can stand strong in the market.”
Now with a team of 21, Sally says her experiences have given her resilience and greater confidence in her abilities. She still battles with imposter syndrome – but then tells herself that she’s taken the company’s turnover from £80,000 to £1.6 million. And, following the major investments of 2020, the coming year will be one of consolidation, she says, “just to get everything running nice and lean. But my mindset is growth. As soon as I want to stop growing, I think it’s time to sell.”
While on paper the figures are an indicator of success, what really drives Sally is creating a “brilliant” company that people want to work for.
“I try to make sure that all the team are well looked after,” she says. “Everyone has access to a counsellor, we have pizza nights together, and we’re trying to be really flexible and supportive employers. These are the things that motivate me through the challenges. And I know it’s cheesy, but what was it Rocky said in the film? It’s not about how hard you can punch – but how many times you can keep getting back up.”
