'I left school when I was 16 and went to drive diggers'

I was born in Penrith and my dad Frank had his own civil engineering, fencing and contracting business. So right from a really early age I was brought up around tractors and machines. I've been driving diggers for as long as I can remember. It’s all I’ve ever known.

I left school when I was 16 - much to my mother’s dismay - and went to drive diggers. I worked for Metcalfe Plant Hire in Penrith for 10 years as a plant operator. Then I realised that maybe I should have listened to my mother a bit more and I went back to college and upskilled myself with some IT training while I was still working on a plant on the railways.

The chance came up at Story to be a plant coordinator, which combined everything I had done in my career to date with a bit more opportunity for career progression and utilising the IT skills I had learned.

I took on a trainee quantity surveyor position and Story put me through university and I did a commercial management degree. I ended up transferring over to project management, then operations manager, head of operations, rail director and then rail MD.

I would never ever change my career path because I think it's given me such a grounding in understanding how industry works and how people work. It's really important to me that we don't have a “them and us” division between operational delivery staff and management staff. Having that first hand understanding of the job, what it entails, travelling for work and lodging away from home, you really understand the operators and the operational team’s challenges.

At Story we're really lucky that we've got a lot of experience of doing the jobs on the ground and we have a really strong management, design and engineering team around that. The plant side of it is really pivotal because they are the machines which are going to do the job.

You are bringing together everything from design and project management to the site management operatives who come in and do the physical work. A lot of the time the railway bridges are in and around houses and residential areas and we've got to bring heavy loads and big machinery in around that, so there's an awful lot of stakeholder management.

There's quite a few of our competitors in the rail plant industry that have recently gone out of business and it's created some gaps and some space in the market which we want to fill. There's very much a growth potential for us, with a focus on delivering a high quality product.

I want to grow the business. I want to make sure that we consolidate our position as one of the best if not the best supplier in the industry. There are some real challenges in the rail industry at the moment around affordability and making sure that projects are value for money and delivered efficiently. I think we're really well placed to take some of those challenges head on. I don't think there's a lot of merit in being the biggest. I'd rather be focused on being the best and reinvesting in our people and the business.

I think one thing that Story has been really good at is allowing people to grow and develop their careers. One of the things I want to do is be able to give some of that back by spending quite a lot of time mentoring and developing the team and building that next generation of leaders to come through.

It is fantastic to live and work in Carlisle, close to my family, working for a business I know really well and which has done a lot for my career. My son Harry and I have started trying to climb all of the Wainwrights and try to tick a few off every year. He really likes kayaking and paddle boarding on Ullswater in the summer as well and he plays football and golf too, so a lot of our time is spent around that at the weekends.

I love the fact that we've got such a beautiful landscape on our doorstep and all our friends and family. It's something that I would never contemplate moving away from.