Published at 11:26, Friday, 11 April 2008

Chris Reay looks in perfectly good health but he is adamant that he is suffering from a terrible disease.

Big in buses: Chris’s business bug has seen him turn Reays Coaches at Wigton from a three-minibus sideline into one of the top five coach companies in the UK with an annual turnover of £3 million

He caught it when he was about six years old when he found he enjoyed working in a builder’s yard more than playing ball games with his own age group.

Over the years, it has steadily worsened.

The adrenaline rush of making a clever deal and big money has him in a vice-like grip. “I can’t explain my motivation. It’s just as an illness,’’ he says with a forlorn smile.

It is a malady that has turned Reay’s Coaches at Wigton from a three-minibus sideline into one of the top five coach companies in the country with an annual turnover of £3 million, a staff of 80 and 50 vehicles.

It has also allowed 35-year-old Chris and his wife and business partner Nicola to keep seven horses at their renovated farmhouse at Bolton Low Houses where they are about to add a swimming pool.

Chris owns a new Bentley Continental Flying Spur, a BMW X5, a Mercedes sports saloon and a four-wheel-drive pick-up truck which doubles as a tractor.

What a wonderful disease he suffers from. If only it were contagious.

Chris is walking, talking evidence that building a strong company has little to do with diplomas, degrees and conventional courses and everything to do with drive, hard graft, overwhelming ambition and gut instinct.

It was Chris’s dad Wally who founded the embryonic base of Reay’s Coaches when his job as a salesman faltered in the economic downturn of the late 80s and he looked for something else to do part-time to support his wife Ann and family.

He bought a rusty van from the Forestry Commission which had never been cleaned. In fact, grass was growing under the seats in mud from the boots of forestry workers.

The 10-year-old Chris spent a week scouring, cleaning and polishing the van; he helped his dad Wally convert it into a smart minibus which was then used to take darts and domino teams to their fixtures, adding around £20-£30 a week to the family budget.

Chris has three children, Ellie, aged five, Abbie, two and Millie, 20 months.

At 17, Chris was running his own gang of builders, in charge of £150,000 projects which meant organising sub contraction and liaising with clients. His dad, who now had three minibuses, was suffering from leukaemia and Chris was helping out as much as he could.

He had also bought a mini skip wagon and was busy setting up his own part-time skip-hire business.

Chris’s wife Nicola is his business partner. Nicola is an accountant but in the early days she helped Chris to hand-deliver promotional leaflets about his skip-hire business to every local town and village.

But by the time Wally died in 1995, Chris was investing most of his time and energy into building Reay’s Coaches into a strong company. When he took over the business, it had just three minibuses. He regrets that his father didn’t live long enough to see the massive expansion which began with the arrival of a 16-seater bus just two months after his death.

Chris and Nicola pushed out 5,000 questionnaires to find out what services were needed in their area, beginning with a shopping service, aided by a rural development grant, for the people of Aspatria, Torpenhow and Blennerhasset.

“I was working round the clock, increasing the number of vehicles, services and runs. I have always tried to be a few steps ahead of my competitors. I was working from an industrial estate in Fletchertown; one day the police dropped in at 3.30am because the lights were on and they thought it was a break-in but it was just me still working.

“If you want to build a successful business, you have to eat, sleep and drink it,’’ he says. Chris devours every trade magazine to the point where he can look at any number plate and tell you everything you need to know about the buses which belong to rivals across the country.

Over the last few years, he has run another sideline business – buying and selling coaches.

“I have made mistakes but I always know if there is money to be made in something.

“These days the business is well established and I have a wife and young family which has probably blunted my edge,’’ he says.

Four years ago, the company moved to its new Strawberry Fields depot at Syke Park, Wigton; a building that Chris designed and built himself and which won him a runner-up title in Allerdale Council’s building awards.

Chris’s way of keeping ahead is now to go green. The business has a £20,000 water reclamation unit which allows 95 per cent of water to be recycled every time vehicles are washed and Chris’s next project is to install a wind turbine for energy.

Now Chris and Nicola both feel it is time to step back a little and take time to enjoy family life.

“The children have made me slow down a little but I am still completely hands on at work. If a driver let me down or rang in sick, I would pack my case and take a coach to France myself.

“But my big motivation is doing a deal; that gives me a bigger buzz than just making money. I love to chase a hard deal and get a great result but I feel flat when the chase and the kill are over. That’s why I’ve got to keep on doing it over and over again,’’ he says.

That’s the feeling he describes as a disease; certainly, it sounds like the best possible sort of addiction.

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