Rising through the ranks

Summary
• HoppingsSoftwood Products was established by Charles Hopping’s grandfather.
• Charles joined the company straight from university.
• Hoppings has sites in Epping and Lingfield.
• Added-value products now account for 90% of business.
• Golf is a favourite pastime.

It would be easy to assume that Charles Hopping, chairman of Hoppings Softwood Products, was always destined to take over the mantel of the firm his grandfather had established.

However, that was far from the case.

“My mother always said there was no way she was letting me into the business because I’d fight with my grandfather so I didn’t plan to go into the company,” said Charles.

But that changed when, a year before he completed his university degree in 1976, his grandfather died at the age of 82. There was a “large situations vacant sign for a family member to get involved” and so Charles joined the company.

“I knew nothing about wood. I’d done an economics degree and by the standards of that time that was as close as you got to a business degree,” he said. “I had to learn about wood and about the timber trade.”

Back then Hoppings was very different from the added-value manufacturing business it is today. “It was the sort of business you’d expect if it was run by an 82-year-old chairman with two directors in their late 50s,” said Charles. “We had a calculator – but it was kept in the general office and you used it almost by appointment.”

Charles joined the company as “office boy” and, guided by his father’s cousin who came in as part-time chairman, he learnt the ropes of business and the timber trade.

He initially spent two years at Hoppings’ yard in Whetstone, followed by a stint at the company’s premises in Welling, south London. But these two sites, ideal when they were set up in the 1930s, had been swallowed up by London, so in the mid-1980s they were sold and more suitable locations established in Epping, Essex, and Lingfield, Surrey.

“The first 10 years was about bringing the business up to date and onto a stable trading basis. Then it was a case of developing products and getting a sensible position in the market,” said Charles.

Changing supply sources

And then the 1990s recession hit. Supply sources changed as volumes of Canadian structural timber, which Hoppings had traditionally supplied, fell and British-grown timber strengthened its market position. Faced with these changes, the company started to develop the machining business which is at its core today.

“We moved from a situation where 90-95% of what we sold was unimproved structural wood to today, where 90% is added value,” said Charles.

The key move was setting up a planing mill on the Epping site in 1999, just as decking was gaining popularity in the UK.

“We got a bit lucky,” said Charles. “We had a planing mill within 50m of a treatment plant, which was quite an unusual configuration. It gave us a competitive advantage in decking and at the same time we started to take the marketing of the product much more seriously.”

Market focus

This increasing market focus means a greater emphasis on solutions and on educating people about how to use timber.

“We expect people to know about wood and they don’t,” said Charles. “The timber trade’s position has tended to be ‘if you’d used it properly this wouldn’t have happened’, but it’s our job to make sure people use it properly.

“One of the reasons people don’t use more timber is the lack of easily accessible information, and that’s from the specifier level to the man in the street.”

This recognition of the need to improve information is one of the reasons Charles enjoys his role as a director of TRADA. Meeting the specifier representatives on the board has made him aware of how different their perspective is from that of the timber trade.

“They’re about what a building delivers; they’re not talking about whether this is a piece of redwood. We’re very prosaic but TRADA is about how our industry can deliver solutions profitably,” he said.

Charles also served as president of the London Softwood Club for three years, as president of the East Anglia Timber Trade Association for two and chairman of The Timber Trade Federation’s National Softwood Division for three. He is currently on Forests Forever’s executive board.

He describes his involvement in industry affairs as “fun” but it is really about the wider responsibility.

“It’s about putting something back into the industry but it also gives you a wider view,” he said. “You need to know what’s going on outside your own four walls.”

And outside his company he sees an industry that is, at times, a little complacent.

“We believe that people are going to need a lot more wood without seeing there’s going to be a lot more competition for that wood, whether from other markets or alternative uses, such as engineered wood and the biomass market. The competition for wood is going to become more intense.”

United force

It would help, he said, if the timber industry could work as a more united force. Wood for Good is a good start, but more could be done.

“We need fewer bodies in the industry producing a more co-ordinated approach. But I’m not sure that will happen because there are a lot of different interests and they’re very hard to reconcile. It would be great if we could get all the organisations working much more tightly together.”

As for his own future, Charles believes he will still be chairman of Hoppings when he is 70, although he has slightly reduced the hours he spends in the Epping office. “I love work but it does get in the way of play,” he said.

Stepping back a little allows him to devote a bit more time to golf, to work with his local church and to spend a weekend a month at the Devon holiday home he and his wife bought about five years ago. He is also looking forward to spending time with his new grandchild.

Whether Charles’s son, who works in the company, steps into his father’s shoes remains to be seen and Charles said he won’t apply any pressure. So would he mind if his son didn’t take over?

“Of course I’d mind but if it really wasn’t for him, that’s fine. The trade is littered with reluctant sons who have followed their fathers into business and done the job badly. You should never put someone in that position; it doesn’t do anybody any good.”