Partner Article

Rising from the ashes

Twelve months after resurrecting a firm from the ashes of receivership, three managers are on track to beat their Year One target by 30%, having already passed the £1.2m mark with four months to spare.

This time last year company managers Rob Parkin, Brian Camp and Peter Moody arrived at work at Insulation Industries to find the receivers in the process of shutting down the Northumberland plant.

After ten workers lost their jobs at the recession-ravaged Cramlington firm, Mr Parkin, Mr Camp and Mr Moody stepped in and conducted a management buyout to form Specialist Panels UK.

Today the company – which makes wall panels for clean rooms, cold rooms and fire resistant applications - has built its workforce back to nine full-time employees and has more than surpassed the expectations of its founders.

Mr Moody said the business was now looking to expand after hitting the ground running in its first year and is hoping to break into the lucrative market of office partitions.

He said: “When we started last year it was in the first trough of the recession. We are hopefully coming out of that now and if we can keep things going things could be better.

“We were looking to do over £1m turnover for the financial year but we have got four months left until the end of our financial year and we’ve already done £1.2m so we will be about 25% ahead of the targets we drew up originally and that’s just on the traditional markets.

“If we get a couple of good contracts for the partitions business, we would then look at putting on an extra shift which would employ around four people.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .