From humble beginnings as an 1800s meat mart, H&H Group has grown into a national heavyweight which is primed for growth and bullish about the future. At the helm of the business is Brian Richardson, who tells Andrew Mernin about his route from farm boy to leader of one of the North’s most successful firms.

MANY moons ago a young Yorkshire lad packed his bags and left his family’s tiny dairy farm and went into the big wide world in search of a job.

Back then his expectations weren’t particularly high. He had no idea what he wanted to do while he spent his schooldays battling against, what he calls, the attention span of a gnat. In the end, however, he landed a role which he now believes is “one of the best jobs in agriculture”.

Admittedly it has taken several decades to get there, but Brian Richardson now sits in the saddle of one of the nation’s most successful rural-facing businesses.

As chief executive of H&H Group, he leads an empire with around 250 members of staff, eight divisions ranging from livestock marts to insurance and 140 years of heritage.

Richardson was enlisted in 2008 with the remit of improving the firm’s profitability, on the back of his prolific track record of instilling business growth. And the non-quoted PLC’s latest results would suggest he has done just that.

Last year the company’s annual turnover grew 15% to £11.4m, as the company’s profits topped £1m for the second year in succession. Historically its profits had fluctuated between £300,000 and £600,000 but in 2009/10, while most businesses were embroiled in cutbacks and redundancies, the company unveiled record profits of £2m.

Meanwhile, at the last count, the firm’s auctioneering throughput stood at over £100m, with ongoing diversification into new markets also continuing at pace in the background.

“Things are tough out there, everyone's fighting for the same bit of market, there isn't a lot of money about and property is difficult,” he says from the company’s recently opened North East outpost in Durham.

“But the choice is to either cut back to the basics and keep costs down and hope you'll come out of it or you can use the conditions as an opportunity, develop your staff and spend on sales and marketing, which I think is the only way forward.

“If you do try to cut costs you just get squeezed by inflation so we are looking to grow the businesses and we're positive about the future.”

The latest step in the H&H’s move into new markets saw the Carlisle-headquartered group snap up County Durham-based property firm Nicholson and Weston, with the company re-branded as H&H Land and Property in the process. And the good news for the North East is Richardson’s plans to create new jobs at the division.

“We’ve bought a very good business here and we are looking for significant growth in land and property,” he says.

Having started his career on an agribusiness management trainee scheme fresh off his family farm on the outskirts of Harrogate, Richardson made an eventual foray into the world of pig genetics after joining farming and estate management group JSR in 1982. It was here that he met a career-changing mentor and became a globetrotting pig genetics salesman, culminating in a five-year tenure as managing director.

“We were marketing pig genetics across the world. The UK was at the centre of pig genetics then and the company was ahead of its time. It took traditional pig breeding onto genetics and moved it forward.

“Very quickly there was an international pig breeding business there and for the last five years I ran a business which had 60% of its income coming in from overseas.

“We signed a franchise agreement in the US and developed a business in Australia to look after the Asian market because, in terms of pig meat, the Chinese in particular eat a lot.”

As well as enabling him to see the world, Richardson believes his time at JSR also taught him some vital leadership lessons which he has carried though to H&H.

“The chap who owned the company, John, was a very difficult guy but an extraordinary person to work for and I learnt a lot from him. His whole ethos was that nothing was impossible. He was a pioneer of pig genetics in the UK and if he felt there was a market in Brazil he just got on the plane and went to Brazil and found a market.

“It was that can-do attitude that I admired. He was totally non-PC in the way he worked but he did have this great belief in developing people. He always said management was about making things happen and I’m a great believer in that.”

And make things happen, Richardson certainly has, by driving rapid growth in virtually every role he has had since his 17 years with JSR.

Beyond his days in pig genetics, Richardson still retains an obvious interest in the role science has to play in the current and future livestock industry.

“I’m not talking about five-legged pigs but there’s a huge world population to feed and we’ve not got to forget that really,” he says.

“Organic farming isn’t going to feed the world and most of our food is going to come from intensive farming. That needs good genetics and good husbandry. It’s all about putting the pieces together.”

Throughout his career Richardson has operated in two worlds, swapping between his corporate cloth and the tweed and wellingtons attire of the countryside.

His dualistic tendencies extend to his personal life, with the Yorkshireman being among the few – or perhaps one of the only – football supporters to back both sides of perennially warring factions Leeds United and Manchester United. An extravagantly-priced Old Trafford season ticket proves this is no passing interest.

But given his prolific track record in driving rapid business growth, it is perhaps unsurprising that he classes himself as a businessman first.

“I’m not a quasi farmer and have never had the talents to be a practical farmer,” he says.

By his own admission he may not be a hands-on agriculturalist, but he does have a firm grasp of the pressures and challenges farmers are subject to.

And it was this knowledge, which may be derived from his childhood days on the farm, that successfully carried him through his time at the helm of a farmers’ co-operative with 600 members.

In a five-year stint as chief executive of the co-operative, he oversaw an increase in throughput from £30m to £50m while expanding its reach throughout the country. He was also a key figure in spreading the word among farmers that working together was the only way forward if they were to survive.

This was a trend he had previously witnessed in New Zealand during his time on a prestigious Nuffield scholarship, of which only 10 to 20 are awarded each year. He won the scholarship to investigate agricultural co-operation overseas and the information he devised is still used by many co-operative organisations in the UK.

“Prices were tight, profits were squeezed, there was foot and mouth to contend with so it was a challenging time for farmers. We were trying to improve their profitability and, while farming was very tough, there was a natural benefit for farmers to join the organisation and it grew considerably.

“Today farmers are more prepared to work together because, in agriculture, the customers of the farmer are the huge great behemoths of the supermarkets and farmers' produce only represents 10% of the value by the time it goes through places like Sainsbury's.

“Farmers need to work together to give them structure and I think they realise that doing their own thing doesn't work. They need strategic alliances to work with.”

In his current role, which the 50-year-old believes will hopefully see out his career, growth in all its forms is the order of the day.

“In the last two and a half years we've gone from 160 staff to 250,” he says. “We are looking to keep growing and we aren't worried about taking the right sort of staff on. We've got great heritage and we want to keep it going.”

If H&H's expansion-hungry boss is to keep the company's wheels turning, there is much to occupy his working week from farming marts and motors to the group's flourishing printing division.

But driven by his maxim to 'make things happen' and inspired by personal heroes like Margaret Thatcher and Sir Alex Ferguson, few would argue that he is the right man to keep the H&H story going for years to come.