AstroSport Limited Nominated for Nottinghamshire Small Business of The Year Award...

Turfing out the grass is helping firm grow...

FED up with mowing your lawn? Call AstroSport... and they can replace your grass with premiership-style plastic turf. Extreme though that answer to mower-phobia may seem, people are queuing up to have their gardens given the ‘‘plastic surgery’’ treatment...

But it is a boom in its bread and butter business - installing artificial sports surfaces - which has enabled AstroSport to increase its turnover by more than 40 per cent during the downturn.

Launching his firm a decade ago, principally as a sports surface-laying subcontractor to larger projects, founder Andy Whelan has built up healthy sales and currently employs seven people.

And such is its continuing growth that he has just added yet another specialist team serving the growing market sector.

Now, the Lenton firm is also a nominee for the Business Link-sponsored Nottinghamshire Small Business of the Year Award - part of the Evening Post Business Awards.

A key move in the current growth surge was bringing his brother, Carl, on board.

Andy said: "He had been sales and marketing director with a much larger company and has joined us to raise our profile in the sports surfacing sector, and is making a pretty good job of it, too.

"We both have more than 25 years' experience in the industry."

The company works with all sorts of surfaces, from artificial grass to painted macadam and the polymetric (rubberised) family of surfaces frequently used in children's playgrounds.

"Customers for our core business, main contractors apart, include local authorities, schools, sports clubs and domestic users," said Andy.

"The past two years have been pretty good because, among other things, of the vast amount of money being pumped into schools and grassroots sport by the Government, Sport England, the FA and, of course, the national lottery."

And AstroSport's recently launched "plastic surgery" for gardens - known as Citigrass - is already attracting attention from a lot of home owners.

"The potential of that market is huge, especially as it means dealing direct with the end users rather than contractors," said Andy.

From an article in the Nottingham Evening Post 02/02/10