Shredding documents can be a painstaking and thankless task … yet one just about every business has to do.
That gave Mike Cluskey the idea for a new business when he took redundancy and his Huddersfield-based business, Go Shred, is now 10 years old with close to 4,000 clients on its books.
Mike took all the positive elements of every company he had worked for previously – including shredding businesses – to offer excellence in customer service and within a year his wife, Belinda, entered the business and is now its customer service director.
Starting with a government Enterprise Allowance loan, a laptop, mobile and a van, Fixby-based Go Shred has grown into one of the largest independent shredding companies in the north and the company now also does document scanning and storage.
Mike said: “From the creation of the company, Go Shred’s vision was to create access to secure shredding for all and we revolutionised the industry by creating our innovative Mini Shred and Midi Shred products for domestic clients and small businesses in 2014.
“These have given people access to affordable GDPR compliant document security, with a full audit trail, for the first time.
“If documents are not shredded onsite they are transported by us on a secure, GPRS tracked vehicle to high security depots where they are emptied out, ready for immediate secure shredding by a static industrial paper shredder capable of processing up to eight tonnes per hour.”
The company is very environmentally-minded. After shredding, the materials are fed into a huge baler, churning out bales that weigh between 400kg and 500kg.
Once there is enough to fit on an articulated lorry the materials are taken to a paper mill, usually in the UK, where they are turned into paper towels and similar products.
Mike added: “If you use an office shredder you cannot recycle the shredded paper afterwards. Paper recycling requires there to be a strand of fibre long enough to reconstitute with other strands and office shredders take the paper down so small it is good for nothing but landfill or to be burned as energy for waste.”
Go Shred is a winner of the Eaton Smith Business of the Month award and came third in the Eaton Smith Business of the Year awards in 2022.
Go Shred is certificated to ISO9001 Quality Management Standard (QMS) and the European Shredding Standard EN15713 and is audited yearly for both. The company is also a full member of the Shredding Industry’s governing organisation, the UK Security Shredding Association.
The company’s most recent customer satisfaction survey saw them gain a +94 Net Promoter Score (NPS), the globally recognised barometer for customer service surveying which is unprecedented in their industry. They have a 5 star Google review rating from more than 230 reviews.
For more on Go Shred go to https://goshred.co.uk/
Written by ANDY HIRST who runs his own Yorkshire freelance journalism agency AH! PR (https://ah-pr.com/) specialising in press releases, blogging, website content and copywriting.
