“I think I was able to look at it, with a completely fresh approach, erm, and it was quite a different approach to what it had been in the past. In the old London Brick days, and I won`t knock it because there was an awful lot of good about London Brick, but it was a time when London Brick held sway, and salesmen and sales managers were nothing more, really, than order takers. They allocated bricks, because there was always, erm, usually a shortage of bricks. And so, you know, its customers were trying to get bricks. I would say as the years went on and certainly in the late `70s, that pendulum began to swing, and you had to go out and sell and compete and the like, so. And there was an awful lot of the old London Brick, erm, who were not used to, sort of getting out there and winning business, I’ve got to say that. So, if we were going to succeed, and we had to, as I say, we had to meet budgets, we had to meet targets, you had to do what was necessary to, to meet that. It`s, erm, one thing looking back and thinking, ‘Oh yes, that was nice, it was comfortable, it was er easy’, but you can`t look back in life - you do have to look forward. And, in a changing world, and certainly in the ‘80s everything was changing anyway; companies were becoming more aggressive, much more aggressive. And so it went for building companies and the whole change was sort of chained through the whole lot.”
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