Pride in their work

Dramatic changes in the industry prompted Tim Price and Roger Aldridge to form Pride Catering Partnership in February 1998, each contributing £5,000 in funds.

"The big players were dominating the scene and we'd seen our organisations grow from personal companies to multinational players," says Aldridge, who had left Eurest in 1997 with a view to setting up on his own.

"We were more business managers than caterers. People join our industry because they like to work with people and offer them a service and quality food. I felt I could not get this in Eurest any more."

He and Price, who handed in his notice as operations manager at Capitol the week it was sold to Granada (although he swears that this was a coincidence), budgeted for six contracts per year. They won their first by May 1998 and notched up a turnover of £211,000 in their first year. They now have 16 contracts and a turnover of £1.5m.

In the spring of 1998, they were joined by chairman Roger Gillespie, who had run his own company, R&S Catering, before selling to OCS, a facilities management company which owns Sovereign Catering.

In the summer of 1999, Price and Aldridge won a contract to cater for the Furze Hill Lodge residential care home, at Banstead in Surrey, and scooped another five homes in six months. While the major share of their contracts remain in business and industry, nursing and residential homes now form 40% of their business and includes clients such as Rukba (Royal United Kingdom Benevolent Association) and Friends of the Elderly.

"It's a close-knit sector and, if you do a good job in one home, you're recommended to others," says Price. "Many homes are run cheaply, but we're not interested in those. We want our chefs to be able to create attractive food, so we're only interested in the top end of the market."

Giving catering managers autonomy is important, as Aldridge explains. "Most of our contracts are cost-plus with performance guarantees," he says, "so we have bonus schemes for catering managers who can then benefit from the success of the company. We keep bookkeeping simple, and catering managers can also manage their own purchasing from a list of local and national suppliers."

Although nursing and residential care homes make up 40% of its business, Pride is looking to expand its B&I base as well as move into the education market. It is currently developing a stand-alone modular deli bar concept suitable for sites with limited space, or where the client does not want to invest in heavy-duty equipment. The first went into insurance company AON, at Caterham on the Hill in Surrey, in October with a turnover of £95,000, and has already exceeded sales budget by 25%.