Fifty years with the same company: workforce continuity lessons for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Mick Ballard has marked 50 years’ continuous service at the Leicester branch of builders’ merchant Travis Perkins, having first joined predecessor firm Travis & Arnold in 1975. Now 77 and working as a yard customer assistant at the Leicester Central branch on Ravensbridge Drive, Ballard has seen the site relocate twice, from Sanvey Gate to Swan Street and then to its current location. Colleagues celebrated his golden anniversary with a branch gathering, champagne and vouchers, recognising rare long-term retention in a merchant environment.
Technical Brief
- Corporate transition included 1988 merger of Travis & Arnold with Sandell Perkins to form present brand.
- Role progression has covered multiple positions before settling into current yard customer assistant function.
- Branch operations have remained within central Leicester, despite two local relocations over five decades.
- Site moves from Sanvey Gate to Swan Street then to Ravensbridge Drive reflect evolving depot logistics needs.
Our Take
Within the 374 Infrastructure stories in our database, very few focus on individual careers like Mick Ballard’s at Travis Perkins, which signals how unusual multi‑decade continuity is in a sector where branch networks and ownership structures have been repeatedly reconfigured since the 1980s.
For UK builders’ merchants such as Travis Perkins, retaining long‑tenured staff at locations like Leicester Central is often critical to contractor loyalty and credit management, as experienced counter staff typically hold informal knowledge of local firms’ reliability and preferred products that is hard to codify.
The 1988 merger that created Travis Perkins sits in a wave of consolidation our coverage tracks across UK construction supply chains, and long‑serving employees who bridged pre‑ and post‑merger eras often act as informal integrators of legacy systems, pricing practices and customer relationships at branch level.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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