Two Years Strong: Toby’s Journey with B&G

With two years service under his belt, our MD Neil Crofts shares a brief insight into working alongside our Head of Contracting, Toby Hall.

Toby has lived on and had worked on the Radbourne Estate, the same estate as our Head Office and my own farm in Derbyshire for many years and I have known him and his wonderful family very well for 15 years or so.

And so 2 years ago, with an opportunity to join the company and lead our contracting division, it seemed to be an ideal fit. Farming was becoming unreliable, uneconomical and didn’t appear to have the security and future it maybe had a generation or so ago.

Toby has worked in farming since childhood and was self employed for many many years, principally farming sheep, running a livery yard but turning his hand to almost anything the estate needed – and it’s those skills that have proved absolutely invaluable in his role at B&G.

What we didn’t expect him to take on so seamlessly was his rapid adaption to a corporate life, to technology and the wider pressures of staff and client management. He’s one of the first to don his tuxedo for a corporate knees up!

In the last 2 years Toby has been a revelation.

He is uniquely traditional in his ways. He expects a good days work, to be punctual, for the work to be done to a high standard and for equipment to be well looked after and maintained and for each project to make a profit. They’re principally standards developed over a lifetime in farming but also in working for himself. And qualities that stand his division in good stead.

His adaption to working alongside the wider company, to clients and our other teams, to using the companies ever evolving project management systems and processes has been the perfect complement to a person that can turn his hand to literally anything and do it to a brilliant standard.

A role in contracting means that you’re having to be ever adaptable. No site is the same and no job is the same. The work is demanding and there’s staff to support and develop along the way.

From the outset, Toby identified a range of a kit that would set us up in a far more self sufficient way and he’s built a very dynamic team that produce, under his leadership some absolutely fabulous work.

The department is increasingly more self sufficient in procuring its own work. A team effort shared with the ever impressive Harry Davison and Matt Norris in our Ecological Mitigation Department. Sites are visited, thought and talked through, costed and thankfully often instructed!

The work volume is mind blowing but to complete things to such a high standard at pace is the real skill. This year his division will have installed over 20,000 metres of GCN/reptile fencing, installed absolutely tons of post and rail fencing, planted literally thousands of whips and standards, moved habitat and created new, felled and cleared a lot, worked on a lot of new badger setts and closed them too, they build a brilliant tree protection fence and build lots of ponds. This is niche work in an ever demanding industry.

In the pipeline are projects including the translocation of waxcap mushrooms, building standalone bat houses, bird hides and much more. All projects that Toby will design and lead with the same conviction and attention to detail that he has applied to everything else.

It’s an absolute pleasure to see someone’s work and skill being appreciated by a far wider audience and to work alongside him.

Keep up the great work Toby! 

– B&G offer a wide range of contracting services to support our ecology, arb and archaeological teams. It’s been important to us that when our technical reports make a recommendation that something be done we can see it through to implementation. For any support on the services mentioned in this article or for anything else similar please get in touch.