For twenty years, Essex House in Witham has been our home. In that time we’ve gone from a regional operator with a handful of staff to a business serving customers right across the country, and the building has had to keep up with every stage of that growth.

Before Witham, we worked out of Maldon, starting at West End Yard. What began as one suitable base eventually turned into three neighbouring units as we expanded. It worked, for a while. But the location was never quite right for a company that was growing beyond its Essex heartland.

Our Founder, Steve Hawkins, had wanted to move the office closer to the A12 for years. The thinking was straightforward: get engineers and collectors back to base faster, make it easier to grab parts, and keep the whole operation running smoothly.

“I’ve always wanted to move the office so that we were on the A12, to make it easier for the collectors to come back and the engineers to come back and get parts etc.” – Steve Hawkins

Finding the right building

The move came about almost by accident. Steve was driving round an industrial estate in Witham when a building caught his eye, the location was right, and the access to the A12 was exactly what he’d been after.

It was bigger than we needed at the time. But it was freehold, and it offered something we’d never really had before: room to build a proper head office, with space to grow into.

Steve talked it over with Guy, and the idea of buying the building started to take shape. The original plan was fairly modest, use what we needed and let out the rest to other businesses. Getting there meant a few conversations with the bank, not least because we were, at first, planning to hold onto the Maldon site too. 

Once the move happened, though, Witham quickly became our real base.

A move that landed right in the middle of rapid growth

We moved to Witham in 2006 with around 17 staff. Eighteen months later, that number was closer to 70.

A few things drove that. We acquired Cosmic Video, which had been operating out of London, and then Leisure Link’s exit from the pub-machine market opened up a wave of new business almost overnight. New sites, new responsibilities, and a fair number of people from the industry who needed somewhere to land.

Some of that new business came through major pub groups, Wetherspoons, Mitchells & Butlers, Greene King among them.

It didn’t take long for Essex House to feel the strain. The building offered around 10,000 square feet, and we filled every bit of it. Even with Maldon still running, things got tight enough that a mezzanine floor had to go in just to create more room.

The move gave us a proper base, just as intended. It just had to keep evolving almost as fast as we did.

More than an office

Over the past twenty years, Essex House has never really been just an admin building. Our logistics, engineering, service, sales, finance and customer support teams have all operated out of it day to day, organising equipment, prepping machines, managing vehicles, and generally doing the coordinating that keeps everything moving behind the scenes.

Engineers need parts close by. Collectors and drivers need a workable route network. Account managers and office staff need to stay connected to both customers and the field teams. Being close to the A12 made all of that easier, right at the point when we were starting to outgrow our original patch.

From Witham to a wider operation

In the years after the move, our reach kept growing. More relationships with major customers and pub groups, more contracts, and a steadily more structured operation to match the needs of a national business.

It also changed how we thought of ourselves. We stopped being a small operator working out of a home base and became something with the scale, systems and people to take on bigger, more complicated relationships. We didn’t lose what got us there in the first place though – the service, the responsiveness, the years of relationships built up along the way. Essex House just gave us a stronger platform to work from.

Twenty years of change

The industry has shifted a lot since 2006. Machines have changed, customer expectations have moved on, and technology now runs through almost everything we do, from how we take payments to how we manage the fleet.

We’ve kept pace with it all – building out our service capability, moving into digital and contactless, developing new product areas. Essex House has stayed put through all of it.

Looking ahead

Twenty years at Essex House is a mark of everything our team has built together.

None of it would have happened without the people who’ve come through those doors: the engineers out on the road every day, the collectors and drivers keeping the routes running, the office teams holding it all together behind the scenes, and everyone who’s joined us along the way and helped shape what SX Leisure has become. People who started out in Maldon are still with us. Plenty more have joined since and got stuck in just as fast.

So as we mark twenty years at Essex House, our thanks go to every one of them. It started with a practical decision to find somewhere better connected, with enough room for what came next.

What it’s turned into is a base for a team we’re proud of, and one we’re looking forward to building the next chapter with.

Twenty years at Essex House. A stronger base for the next chapter.