Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024, RTS Forestry provides professional forest management, timber harvesting, consultancy and contracting services across Scotland and England. As it eyes further expansion, Forestry Journal caught up with managing director Norman O’Neill to hear about the story so far.
THE year 1984 was one of momentous events, with papers of the day carrying stories of the Miners’ Strike, Band Aid and the launch of the first Macintosh computer.
One story absent from the headlines was the formation of RTS Forestry. But across the next four decades, the company would come to have a huge impact on the industry and the British landscape, evolving into one of the UK’s leading independent forest management firms.
A harvesting manager with Tilhill, Alan Robbins decided to strike out on his own, founding Robbins Timber Services, a company with just two employees – Alan and his wife Heather – effectively operating from their kitchen table.
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Soon becoming known by the initialism RTS, it began as a timber harvesting organisation – something which remains a core part of the business – starting with modest contracts for a range of Scottish landowners. After a few years, the team began looking at opportunities to replant the areas they had felled, expanding the scope of their business.
The company enjoyed consistent growth over the following decades, taking on staff, opening new offices and adding to its range of services offered. In 2007, it diversified into woodfuel, quickly becoming one of the largest suppliers of woodchip in Scotland, controlling every aspect of the supply chain.
In 2010, it opened its purpose-built headquarters in Crieff, from which it continues to offer independent professional forest management and contracting services today. This was followed by the opening of a second office in Aboyne in 2012 and the investment of over a million pounds in its biomass business in 2013.
Work continued to build up over the following decade, with many more people joining the company and many more clients seeking their services. In 2019 RTS accepted a proposal to bring the EGGER Forestry Management portfolio under its wing, which involved opening a new office in Hexham and four EGGER forest managers transferring across. The company continued to grow with the opening of a new office in Inverness in 2022 and the relocation of the Aboyne office to Inverurie earlier this year.
In the midst of all this, in 2017, a management buyout saw 100-per-cent ownership of the business pass from Alan and Heather to its three directors – Harry Wilson, Ross Kennedy and current MD Norman O’Neill. By this point the company had grown to become a significant forest management company across Scotland and North England,with over 50 employees.
Norman joined RTS in 1999 and was party to its sustained growth over the following 25 years, first as forest manager, then director, before succeeding Alan as MD. A passionate advocate for being customer-orientated, building strong, effective relationships with clients and putting their needs at the heart of all decisions when delivering projects, his approach is one that has been adopted by the wider team across the company.
Reflecting on the firm’s consistent growth through the years, he said: “It’s all thanks to having really good staff that enjoy doing what they’re doing and appreciate the importance of looking after our clients, our contractors and our colleagues.
“I’m a believer in the importance of ‘project ownership’. I think if you can give managers full responsibility for their projects, while providing support to them, this allows individuals to develop professionally, building their own ideas and personalities, and importantly dealing directly with the clients, suppliers and contractors instead of going through a whole chain of management. In this way we see our staff develop as foresters and they find the job much more enjoyable and rewarding.”
Recruitment is a challenge across forestry and RTS is certainly no exception. Expansion has demanded the addition of more skilled staff and the company is using a range of recruitment models to continue the search for the best available people. RTS relies on its good long-term relationships with colleges and universities to supply a steady stream of students for work experience who will become prime candidates for full-time employment on graduation.
“We’ll regularly take three or four students each year,” said Norman. “They come in and we expose them to a whole range of different elements of work. I’m trying, even at that early stage in their career, to encourage ownership of all or at least part of any project they are working in.
"They’re not here just to join the dots. We want them to go out and feel they’ve actually done something, contributed in a significant way to the management of new or existing forests.
“This year we have students coming from Bangor, Cumbria and Inverness. Interestingly, all are female students this year, which shows how the industry has changed for the better in recent years. It will hopefully help attract more people into forestry in that it clearlyis no longer as male-dominated as it used to be.””
RTS Forestry is certainly a very different business now than it was at conception, operating across five areas – harvesting, consultancy, forest management, infrastructure and woodfuel. While the company may once have relied heavily on harvesting, today all sectors are performing well. Clients include private landowners, conservation charities, utility companies and forest investment companies.
“The forest industry is really doing pretty well right now,” said Norman. “Land under RTS management has certainly increased significantly in recent years. That’s probably the easiest way to gauge success.
“We’ve moved into a lot of utility work, formalising it as the infrastructure division of the company, basically servicing the needs of wind farm and utility companies, with projects right across Scotland.
“We do a lot of consultancy work for these companies as well, dealing with environmental impact assessment, the design of the felling required, public inquiries to reach approval, at which point we can then deliver the associated tree-harvesting work.
“It’s a good model for us, because if you’re right at the very beginning of the process as a consultant, you know there’s a good chance you might be seeing the project through. The client also benefits hugely in that the design process is being created by the same team who are then delivering it, with a great understanding of the industry and the practicalities of the work to be done.”
Through its trading arm, RTS (Woodfuel), the company is a significant player in the Scottish biomass industry, annually producing 40,000 tonnes of woodfuel and supplying over 120 installations including hotels, schools and hospitals.
Politically, the tide appears to be against further promotion of biomass with the absence of any financial incentives to encourage new applicants. Norman sees as a missed opportunity.
He said: “Our model for creating and distributing this form of renewable energy is one I’d love to see continuing to expand and help support the country’s objectives in moving to Net Zero.
Locally, in Perthshire, there’s not a lot of end-use of timber and we see most of our timber moving outwith the area. We can, through RST Woodfuel, source 30–40,000 tonnes of renewable material, felled each year from local forests, and then see that used within the local area. From many angles it is still a good news story, delivering green energy while also reducing the carbon footprint from timber haulage to more distant end users. It would be great to see both Scottish and the new UK governments take a fresh look at this.”
On the subject of politics, Norman expressed concern about the prevailing view of forestry in government and the industry’s struggles to make its voice heard.
He said: “There is a message that needs to get through. One of the biggest problems is making sure we in the industry understand what the message is.
“Forestry as a whole has some disparate entities in it. If you’re the Woodland Trust or RSPB, you’ll want to take things in a different direction than Confor or the sawmillers. I feel some sympathy for the MPs and MSPs, getting such opposing messages from groups that they see as representing forestry, and being expected to sort it out.
“Commercial forestry is not very good at making a case for itself, whereas the conservation groups have developed a much slicker and focussed lobbying model. They’ve got a much clearer message and objective than the timber-orientated part of our industry. However, I do firmly believe there is space in our country for both elements of forestry to continue to develop and importantly provide for our timber and environmental needs going forward. The message has to be that we as an industry, can deliver a diverse portfolio of new forests and there is room for all to achieve their own objectives, whether that be commercial or more conservation-based .
“At RTS, we have developed a wide portfolio of landowning clients, including many who are conservation based in addition to those having a more commercial objective. We continue to see a significant move to well-designed multipurpose forests that can deliver the wide range of objectives set by the government. I would say we see all our landowning clients understanding the long-term importance of developing a sustainable forest industry which will deliver on this diverse range of objectives.”
When Norman joined RTS, back in 1999, there were only four members of staff. Over the last 25 years that has number has grown 10 times and over. But in its 40th year the company is seriously looking at further expansion and further recruitment.
“The objective would be to have more local and complete coverage with forest offices across Scotland and north England,” said Norman. “In addition to developing an office in south Scotland, the logical thing would be to have an office in the west, somewhere like north Argyll.
Those two things are in the planning stages, but we’re not going to expand just for the sake of expansion. There have to be good, competent people in those offices that can deliver to the standards we have set as RTS has developed over the years.
“It’s about getting somebody who wants to be there, who wants to develop their own portfolio of clients, where they are comfortable dealing with the contractor and the client, and have that ownership of the entire project from start to finish.
“You can have a very effective and also soft-touch company management style when you know your colleagues can be relied on to perform well and get enjoyment out of delivering results.
“Everybody here enjoys their job. They’re creating good friendships with colleagues, clients and contractors and taking pride in what they’re doing. And, most importantly, they’re having fun doing it.”
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