The Impact Files Podcast — Adrian Sell, Chief Executive, Oxford Wood Recycling
Ned: Thank you so much for joining us today for another episode of The Impact Files podcast. We’re delighted to be joined by Adrian Sell, Chief Executive of Oxford Wood Recycling. Adrian, let’s start with an introduction to yourself.
Adrian: Thank you, Ned, and thank you, Ally. So, as you say, I’m Adrian Sell, Chief Executive of Oxford Wood Recycling. Oxford Wood Recycling has been going for over 20 years now. I took over about five months ago from Richard Snow, one of the founders, who had also been Chief Executive for about 15 years.
We do a number of things. Starting with collecting waste wood from businesses and domestic sites — identifying that a lot of wood had been ending up in landfill, picking it up from businesses and taking it to our site in Abingdon, where we sort out any wood that’s good enough to sell, and send any waste wood that’s not usable to be processed and used in biomass fuel generation. It gives businesses a service because it’s cheaper than skips — we go and pick the wood up and load it onto the truck. And it’s environmentally beneficial too: it offsets or delays CO2 emissions, and the trucks we use are much lighter and smaller than skip lorries, so there are savings in both cost and CO2.
At the woodshop in Abingdon, we sell reclaimed wood alongside sustainable British hardwoods and other bought-in timbers — normally seconds — so we’ve got a good range of stock. We do some manufacturing too: sanding, cutting, making things look their best, so some of the hardwood slabs we have in look very impressive when you walk through the door.
And within all of that, we run a support-into-employment programme, where we take people who are facing barriers to employment and provide them with work experience and support developing CVs and job applications. We work with people facing a whole range of barriers — neurodiversity, lack of experience or qualifications, people who have come out of prison. We support around 10 to 15 people a year into employment. That helps us in terms of capacity, but more importantly helps them get back into work and a productive way of life.
Ned: When you say you’re supporting them into employment, does that mean you’re employing them yourselves?
Adrian: Some of them, yes. We have a number of people in our workforce who’ve come through the Employment Support Programme. But we also support people into external jobs — we had someone just in the last couple of weeks who started a job with Tesco, having not been in employment for many, many years. He was delighted. Whilst they’re getting the work experience, they’ll often be working with us in the woodshop, processing wood or serving customers, sometimes out with the collections team — providing us with some capacity, and getting meaningful work experience themselves.
Ned: And in terms of the size of the business — what sort of scale are you at?
Adrian: Our turnover is about £800,000. We employ 20 to 25 people, mostly part-time — I think we’ve got about five full-timers. I’m a part-time Chief Executive. The woodshop is open seven days a week, the collections team work five days a week. We’ve got four vehicles going out doing collections and deliveries. In terms of full-time equivalent headcount, it’s probably around 15 to 18 people. For a seven-day-a-week operation, it’s not a huge number, but it works.
Ally: We’d be interested to hear more about what triggered your desire personally to run a business that balances purpose with profit.
Adrian: I’ve always been very mission-driven in the work I’ve done. Going back to a holiday job at sixth form, I was working as a care assistant in an old people’s home. From there I went to a geriatric hospital, and then to Oxfam, working on humanitarian relief programmes. That desire to deliver social value and be part of a strong community has always been a very powerful driver for me.
But alongside that, I’m also quite scientifically-minded, quite rational, and I’ve always been quite business-minded. I remember quite early on, working in a kind of internal consultancy role for a local authority, and often talking to frontline people, asking: why do we do this? And they’d say, oh, well, it’s good. And I’d say, how do you know it’s good, and how do you know it’s better than the alternative? Not necessarily comfortable conversations to have with people who’ve been working in a certain way for years. But always asking those questions and trying to think about what the most effective way of doing things is.
I’ve worked for charities most of my life, and have always preferred the more commercial side of things. Grants can be fantastic, and a powerful way of investing in things, but as a way of sustaining an organisation, they’re quite tiring — and I say that as someone who’s done a lot of fundraising. Earning money through commercial activities is far more immediate. It’s far easier to see how the effort you put in comes back in terms of income going up or not going up. You can learn and iterate much more quickly. With grants, there’s an element of luck involved — different people present in different ways, different things chime with different readers. Whereas if someone comes to you and buys a product or service, they’re doing it because they value what you offer. And the fact that it’s also doing social good — if the service or product is good — should be something people see as an added bonus.
Ideally, people would come to us rather than going to a commercial wood supplier because we’re competitive on price and they know they’ll get fantastic customer service. The environmental side may not matter so much to some customers, but they still want to come to us. That motivates and excites me in a way that grant applications don’t.
Ally: Perhaps you could remind us what percentage of Oxford Wood Recycling’s revenue is generated from trading.
Adrian: It varies year to year, but it’s never below 80% and often over 90%. The collection service is currently about 50% of our income, the woodshop about 40%, and grants and donations about 10%. That 10% is a really important 10%, but it’s obviously a much smaller proportion than for most charities and social organisations.
Ned: I had the pleasure of working with Leeds Wood Recycling about 18 months ago, so I’m familiar with the terminology, but perhaps you could explain what the collection service is for our listeners.
Adrian: We’re part of a national network of community wood recycling centres — there are around 20 to 25 across the country, and Leeds is one. The collection service collects waste wood from businesses. We have 3.5-tonne trucks that go out with a driver and a support worker. They’ll pick up waste wood — if a building’s being renovated, the builders will have pulled out all the old wood and made a big pile of it, our truck turns up, loads it up, and takes it away.
Sometimes it’s more easily reclaimable wood. In Oxford, we’ve got a huge number of colleges, many of which are doing renovations and repairs, so we’ll sometimes collect beams and interesting pieces of old timber. And pallets — there’s an astonishing number of pallets in circulation, with quite a range of different qualities and sizes. Some we can bring in and sell, some we can give to people for projects, some we can turn into products ourselves, but sadly some ends up getting chipped and used for fuel generation. The collection service is the team that goes out, picks up the waste wood, and either takes it for chipping or brings it back to the shop and gives it fresh life.
Ally: How do you measure sustainability within the business — what are your KPIs?
Adrian: We track how many tonnes of waste wood we’ve collected. When we meet with businesses, we can give them annual reports showing how many tonnes of waste wood we collected from them, how much money that saved them compared to using skips, and how much CO2 that offset. So waste wood and CO2 are two critical indicators. Number of people supported into employment is probably the third most important one. Supporting that, there’s volume and value of sales in the woodshop, which measures income and engagement with the idea of using sustainable wood sources.
More widely, we have a number of programmes around education, learning, and skills development alongside the Wood to Work Employment Support Programme. We have a community shed where people come in and do woodworking projects — all part of educating people and developing skills around using reclaimed wood. Helping build awareness and knowledge of what you can do with reclaimed wood is another key area.
Ally: And that speaks to the supply and demand side of things too.
Adrian: Yes — it’s basically supply and demand. We create the supply through reclaiming the wood, but if the demand isn’t there to use it, it’ll all just get chipped and used for power generation, which is okay, but isn’t great. It isn’t as good as the wood staying in use, so we try and help create the demand for reclaimed wood through those education programmes.
Ally: I love what one of your team said — that you give new life to wood, and you give new life to people.
Adrian: Yes, I can’t remember who said it, but there’s something quite nice about that.
Ned: Tell us about your experience of driving revenues from purpose-led organisations. My experience is that it can be a real challenge — incredibly easy for chief executives to have their time eaten up by grant applications. Can you share some of the successes and things you’ve learned along the way?
Adrian: Certainly. I was Executive Director at Oxford Parent Infant Project — OxPip — for four years. A fantastic local organisation, part of a national network, working with parents and babies at the start of life to try and ensure there’s a loving, secure relationship, which there’s huge amounts of evidence is critically important for success in later life.
When I arrived, there was income coming from the local authority and children’s centres, and a little training work going on — because children’s centres wanted to increase their staff’s awareness around attachment theory, which was foundational to a lot of the therapeutic work. We did a lot of thinking about future direction and strategy, working with some external consultants on a pro bono basis, and looked at both the therapeutic work and the training, and how each could be funded and sustained.
The team were motivated by the therapeutic work — that was their primary interest. Training was a bit of an afterthought. But when we modelled it financially, it became very clear that there was potential to make margin on training in a way there simply wasn’t on the therapeutic work. The therapeutic work would pay for its costs, but rarely very much more.
Modelling this and showing the team that if a certain percentage of their time went into training, the financial sustainability of the organisation would be much stronger — that was critical to getting their buy-in. Having the graphs in front of people, showing the income from training over multiple years and the projections, helped people make the case amongst themselves for why investing their time in that was important.
We built the training from a few tens of thousands to around £100,000 to £150,000 by the time I left — which for an organisation turning over around £400,000 to £500,000 provided a platform of income that gives strength and sustainability. As contracts come and go and funding comes and goes, you can still sustain the core of the organisation.
Ally: Is training something you see expanding at OWR too?
Adrian: Yes, we’ve run some woodworking courses — a basic woodworking techniques course a few weeks ago, and one coming up on how to build a picture frame. We’re planning more in the new year. I don’t think they’ll ever make a huge amount of money, but they’re a nice way of engaging people and developing skills. We also have the Community Shed in Abingdon — open on Wednesday evenings, where people can work on a wood project with guidance from carpenters on site.
We’re also talking with organisations like Abingdon Bridge about developing wood skills with young people. And further downstream, we want more capacity to do outreach — education and awareness of reclaimed wood, but also promotion of us as an organisation and the products and services we offer. Some basic marketing that would help drive sales and income alongside the wider sustainability story.
Ned: I’d love to explore the role of marketing in helping you achieve your objectives. And I’m thinking about marketing in the broadest sense — communications internally, externally, at a strategic level.
Adrian: The collections service works partly through our national partner, who works at a national level with builders and other organisations to generate referrals — I think around 40 to 50% of our collections work comes through them. Locally, we’re pretty well embedded in the building sector. There are gaps, and we’ll work on those, but most builders in the area know about us.
The biggest marketing challenge we have is for the woodshop. We’re sited in Abingdon, outside the city centre, so there’s no natural passing footfall. We’re next door to a great brewery — Loose Cannon — which brings some passing trade, but getting people into the woodshop and aware of what we offer is the biggest challenge we face. We do it through social media — Facebook and Instagram on a regular basis — local community forums, flyers and posters. And we’re increasingly trying to tap into environmental networks, because sustainably conscious DIYers, hobbyists, and small-scale builders are a core market for us, and there are still a lot of people out there who aren’t aware we exist.
Ned: There’s a podcast called Can Marketing Save the Planet? that discussed something very relevant here — an Octopus Energy case study that identified a distinct segment of customers who were effectively climate sceptics, but who loved Octopus because of the price and the customer service. Could there be more emphasis in your marketing on: we’re great value, we’re local, we’re worth a visit — with the social and environmental value as a secondary message rather than the lead?
Adrian: Yes, and I think we do some of that, but you’re right, we could put more emphasis on it. The other thing I’ve been trying to push is the service aspect. If you come into the woodshop and aren’t sure what you need, we’ve got a fantastic team who are hugely knowledgeable and will give you advice and guidance in a way that a commercial wood seller simply won’t. We’ll cut wood to length, sand it, advise on the best approach for a project. For people who have an idea of what they want to do but don’t know the details of how to get there, they can come in, talk to someone, and go away with not just the materials but more knowledge in their head about how to do it.
Ned: That really speaks to video content to me. There are a lot of opportunities there.
Ally: On the question of competition — you’re networked with local timber merchants for the collection service. Is there any tension there, or do you operate in a different enough space?
Adrian: Inasmuch as we’re networked with them, it’s around the collection service — picking up waste wood from them. The seconds we buy come from a national supplier, not local sellers. Once they’re in the shop, people can pick through and find the ones that suit them. The last time we had what we call a load of bananas — warped timber — we put it on social media, and someone came and took the lot because he was cutting them into short lengths, so the warping didn’t matter. He got a bargain, some wood got used that would otherwise have been waste. We don’t feel like we’re directly competing with the merchants in any meaningful way — it’s a competitive market, and we’re all just trying to get known and heard and noticed.
Ally: Where would you like OWR to be in 12 months’ time?
Adrian: Going back to the national network of community wood recycling centres — there are a lot of gaps across the country. South of Oxford — Reading, Southampton — there’s nothing. East and north — High Wycombe, Milton Keynes, Northampton — nothing. West there’s Bristol and one probably starting in Gloucester. Into London there are several dotted around, but large parts of the country aren’t served by a collection service like ours.
So I’d like to be getting investment to set up satellite sites — buying a truck, employing a couple of people, having a site in places like Reading or Milton Keynes where we can store reclaimed wood and then bring it back to Abingdon to sell through the woodshop. Starting to offer the circular economy service in a wider geographical area than just Oxfordshire, and then over time, hopefully adding more woodshops across the country — possibly looking at a high street venue so we have natural footfall rather than having to constantly market ourselves.
Alongside that, I’d like more capacity for outreach — going to community events like Flow Fest, promoting reclaimed wood and the range of uses it can be put to, and raising awareness of us as an organisation. And continuing to develop production in Abingdon — we’re already building things for the domestic market, and looking to build planters, benches, and other items for the commercial market too. Potentially looking at online markets as well, so we’re selling beyond the geographical area around Abingdon.
Ned: And where do you hope the sector will be in 10 years’ time?
Adrian: National coverage is the obvious one — so that wherever you are in the country, you can access a collection service and go somewhere to buy reclaimed wood. There’s a lot of learning we need to do as a network about how we can grow and operate effectively together. The national partner very much sees itself as serving the local partners, which isn’t always the case in federated charitable structures. The network is only around 25 years old, so it’s still early days in many ways. National coverage is what I’d most like to see in 10 years’ time.
Ally: Do you have a view on whether more regulation is needed?
Adrian: The regulation environment has been moving the building sector and others towards more environmental awareness and sustainability, and that’s undoubtedly helped. New building sites in Oxfordshire, for example, have community employment plans and sustainability plans built into the funding streams, with real pressure on builders not to put wood into landfill. I think continuing that legislative pressure is a good thing. I’m not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to say exactly what else is needed, but that direction of travel is positive.
Ned: One piece of advice for social enterprises looking to move away from grant-based income.
Adrian: Think about what you’ve got that other people might want or need. I was involved in running a local carnival for two years, and we had significant funding from BMW — who, we used to joke, paid to close the road. You think: why would a car manufacturer pay to close a road? Because they knew the people who came to the carnival were a lot of their own employees, from the local demographic and area, and they were very keen to be seen giving something back into the community. They got visibility, and we got the funding.
So think about what activities you’ve got, what constituencies and stakeholders you’ve got, what knowledge and expertise you’ve got — and whether that’s valuable to someone else in some way. It may not be selling it directly, but finding an alignment where someone can support you financially because you can give them access to something they’d otherwise struggle to reach.
Ned: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Adrian. Finally — how can people find out more about you and about Oxford Wood Recycling?
Adrian: Website — oxfordwoodrecycling.org.uk. We’re also on Facebook and Instagram, posting regularly. We have a newsletter that goes out every couple of months, so do sign up for that. Or just drop me a line — I’m very happy to chat. I love meeting new people and talking about what we do. Feel free to reach out, and I’m happy for my LinkedIn to be included in the show notes.
Ned: I shall add that to the show notes. Thank you so much — really enjoyed speaking with you.
Adrian: Very interesting conversation.
Ally: I felt like we could have talked for hours longer. It’s so genuinely fascinating.
