About Us
John Mee VAC-EX Hire
John Francis Mee founded John Mee Construction Limited in 1993 to carry out civil engineering work including deep drainage and tunnelling work. In 2005 the company won an award for a Sheffield city centre contract, which specified hand-dig only, due to the site being heavily congested with underground services. John Mee decided to invest in his first vacuum excavator, the UKs first, to complete this job successfully, without any ‘strikes’ on services. This groundbreaking success led to two awards and is still used as a case study for vacuum excavation.
Following the success of the project more vacuum excavators were purchased and the company expanded under the VAC-EX Hire brand name eventually focussing exclusively on vacuum excavation. In 2008 John F Mee established VAC-EX Limited, a separate company, to manufacture smaller remote vacuum excavation units and this company is run by John Patrick Mee, John Mee’s son, at a separate site.
By 2022 John Mee VAC-EX Hire operated over 22 Vacuum Excavator units from both MTS and RSP and a further 12 smaller T-VAC excavators purchased from the sister company VAC-EX Ltd.
New Ownership
In June 2022 John Mee sold John Mee VAC-EX Hire to School House Holdings Ltd, an investment company owned by Dan Bown.
John headed for a well-earned retirement and Dan Bown took over the ownership and management of the company. VAC-EX ltd remains under the ownership of John Mee as a separate entity.
Dan Bown is committed to the continued success of the company and has already started to implement significant changes and investments in the business with a focus on digitalisation, training, in house vehicle servicing and maintenance and a significant expansion of the vacuum excavator fleet. The key focus of the company will be to combine the best operators with the best vacuum excavators, to enable it to continue to support an already successful client list and to expand to other customers across a wide range of sectors.
