The Hill Leigh Timber Products truss plant in Avonmouth has become fast-growing Palgrave Brown’s 19th trading site and boosted its turnover to £60m.

The Hill Leigh business was placed in administration with parent Cox Long in January (TTJ January 27). Shortly afterwards, administrators BDO Stoy Hayward announced that they were selling off the two operations separately.

Palgrave Brown managing director Richard Fawcett declined to say how much the company had paid for Hill Leigh, but said that the acquisition had been funded from its own resources, with support from Barclays and ‘encouragement’ from investment capital specialists Murray Johnstone.

He added that Hill Leigh is currently turning over around £2m and that there was potential to increase this fairly quickly to £3m.

‘The business has been doing quite well, but I think its service recently has been pretty poor,’ said Mr Fawcett. ‘Palgrave Brown has developed a reputation for excellent service and Avonmouth will now come up to our standard.’

The 28-strong team at the 2.65-acre Avonmouth operation (which will be restyled Palgrave Brown) have been retained and works manager Chris Martindale has been promoted to site manager.

The acquistion is Palgrave Brown’s fourth in a year and forms part of its strategy to create a nationwide network of truss fabrication sites.

‘We now have 13 truss branches across England and Wales,’ said Mr Fawcett. ‘That puts us in a very strong position to offer our customers national deals.’

He added that Palgrave Brown remains on target to achieve £100m turnover before 2003.

‘We’ve already gone from £25m two and a half years ago to £60m today,’ he said. ‘We’re still looking for further acquisitions. We’d like to improve our coverage in West Yorkshire and we’re still not represented in Scotland. We won’t preclude any sensible opportunity for growth.’

Palgrave Brown said it might have been interested in buying the truss business out of the Cox Long Stafford site, but that it wasn’t available separately.

BDO Stoy Hayward said that an announcement on the sale of Cox Long is likely next week.