A SUCCESSFUL businessman is selling up 35 years after starting the vehicle hire firm he began with an unwanted raffle prize.
John Brook started Brook-hire in Malvern when he was 30, together with his wife Tina and just one car – an S-reg yellow Vauxhall Viva which had gone unclaimed in a raffle organised by Worcester City football club.
He is staying tight-lipped about how much he has now sold the firm for but agreed it was for a lot more than the value of the first car he sold.
Mr Brook was also working as a lorry salesman at North Worcestershire Motors in Barbourne, Worcester, at the time he set up Brookhire and he had supplied the new car for the prize draw in 1973.
He said: “The person who won it didn’t bother to pick it up so I went around to his house. He said he didn’t want the car and never wanted the raffle ticket in the first place. The ticket was worth £5 and the car, £1,200.”
Mrs Brook, pregnant at the time with their first daughter, ran the firm from their Malvern home while her husband continued with truck sales, but in 1984 the firm bought land off Worcester Road, Malvern Link, near where the Morrison’s supermarket now stands.
In the early 1990s, they sold the land and moved the company to Spring Lane South to set up a garage alongside an existing rental and commercial vehicle sales business.
The company continued to grow supplying rentals in the Malvern and Worcester areas and now it has more than 100 modern vehicles from Luton vans and people carriers to trailers – a far cry from that first Vauxhall Viva.
Mr Brook, aged 64, of Maiden Road, West Malvern, has now sold the business to MTCR Marketing of Abbots Morton, Inkberrow, near Redditch, to focus on his existing property letting business.
He is also looking to expand his portfoilo with a planning application for two new homes on land he owns in Malvern and continue in the motor trade through his other company Brook Transport.
Brookhire will continue to have some family involvement because Mr and Mrs Brook’s daughter Carol James, 34, is staying on in the rentals department.
Their other daughter Anna Brook owns Malvern jewellery firm Iapetus.
Mr Brook said: “I don’t think there is too much emotion. It’s basically a different challenge to the business I ran for many years and I’m looking forward to that challenge over the next five years.”
Mr Brook is staying on at Brookhire until July for a handover period after which the firm will be managed by Malcolm Pritchard on behalf of the new owners, brothers Tim and Richard Hall.
Richard Hall said: “We don’t want to change it in any huge fashion. We want to develop the business, possibly the repairs side and by extending the range on offer.”
