Rochdale property specialist eyes £10m turnover

Posted by on 4 Sep 2023

As part of Rochdale Development Agency’s 30th birthday celebrations we’re speaking to some of the region’s biggest names in business.

Building maintenance firm 1st Contracts is celebrating its 10th birthday in 2023 – although its origins date back further than that.

After starting life on a picnic table in one of the director’s conservatory, it is now based in Littleborough and works with some of the UK’s largest businesses.

The business was originally founded by Richard Yeomans but rebranded as 1st Contracts when Leon Ashworth joined in 2013 and became a joint owner and co-director.

The company has gone from strength to strength ever since and has two distinct arms to its business – maintenance and refurbishment.

With the help of their experienced team , this means 1st Contracts can handle everything from fixing a leaking roof to a major refurbishment for some of the UK’s major retailers and a number of other blue chip clients.

1st Contracts started life in Rochdale but has been in Littleborough for the last six years.

Its two-storey headquarter on Featherstall Road is equipped with a helpdesk, a training/meeting venueand a gym.  This office acts as a hub for its UK operations.

Today the company employs 47 and has a turnover of £6.5m – with ambitions to grow to 50+ staff and reach a £10m turnover in the next three years.

Thirty of the company’s staff are engineers and are based across the UK as far wide as Glasgow and Bristol.

Leon said the company lived by its mantra: ‘Our people are our power’ We truly believe that the people we work with and our personalities are what makes us different from our competition. How we work with our clients and supply partners, our families and the communities we are part of.

The director, who has worked in the property maintenance industry since leaving college in 1997, said Rochdale was the perfect place to base a business and praised the role of the Rochdale Development Agency (RDA).

He said: “We operate nationwide so our close proximity to the northern motorway network means we can be on our way to Yorkshire, Central England or Cumbria almost as soon as the call comes in.

“Rochdale is great for business and we have trusted and long-standing relationships with lots of local companies, we wouldn’t be where we are now without them.

“A lot of our suppliers are other Rochdale businesses and that’s important to us, we always try and trade with our local business first.

“There’s a real community feeling among Rochdale businesses and the RDA is at the heart of that. Recently following one of the RDA workshops we appointed Linda Miller as our welfare champion and that has already made a big difference to how we work with our team.”

“We’re very proud to be celebrating our 10th birthday as 1st Contracts and that 10 years has gone in a flash.

“We are immensely proud of that achievement but you never really get time to appreciate it because there’s always the next achievement on the horizon.

“Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we started out in 2013 on a picnic table in my conservatory. Now we’re doing a turnover of £6.5m, employ 47 staff and have ambitions to grow further.”

After clocking up a decade, Leon said the best was yet to come for 1stContracts but insisted Rochdale would always be its home and very much part of everything we do.


“We’re proud to be Rochdale-based and most of our staff are from the area,” he said.