Hugh Facey, chairman of Gripple, continually works with customers internationally to meet their needs.
Hugh Facey set up Gripple, the £25m-turnover business in 1989 after a farmer he sold fencing to told him whoever found an easy way of joining fences would make a fortune.
Fortunately for Facey, he and the engineering brain behind the ‘Gripple’, Brian Shawcross, made a prototype of the fence joiner and it worked.
Facey attached the Gripples to his own fencing to give it the edge over his competitors’ fencing. But he was surprised to find that in the first year he sold as many individual Gripples as he did on the fencing.
Today the company sells 30 million Gripples a year and the machines in its Sheffield factory churn out one a second. But the number used on agricultural fencing is less than 10 per cent of those sold worldwide.
Ten years ago Facey tried to develop Gripples for use on wire rope to serve an industrial market. “It was a massive market but we just couldn’t make it work,” he says. “We pushed water uphill with the rope grips until 1999.”
Facey realised the industrial market didn’t know about Gripples and how to use them so he put the wire rope and the Gripple together and sold it as a Gripple Hang-Fast. Sales of the product soared and the industrial side of the business is now the largest – 70 per cent of sales.
Facey bases the company’s success on persistence and constantly investing in innovation. He says: “It is amazing how if you don’t worry about money, it keeps accumulating. If you borrow it and invest it, you grow and invest.”
And, in particular, he has an eye for international growth. “I have been lucky to be able to travel quite young. My father came from Canada and I was always brought up with a world view of life. So I always saw the opportunities internationally,” he says. “I have always had a thing in my head that the UK makes up only 5 per cent of world GDP so that leaves 95 per cent to go at. Eighty-two per cent of our business is export, but I keep saying it’s not enough.”
And the more you travel, the more you learn because every country is different and can use different variations of a product. One of Gripple’s distributors in South Africa called Facey one day to say he had sold the Gripple into the vineyards – potentially a big market – so Facey visited.
More than an enjoyable business trip, Facey watched the way they tensioned the wire at the vineyards – with a chain and grab handle. “It was unbelievably antiquated,” he says.
A year after he returned to South Africa, Gripple launched a tensioning tool and now sells 30,000 a year.
Facey is also passionate about his staff. The chairman dictates that all employees buy shares in the business after their first year, and they own about 38 per cent of the business.
“If you buy it you value it,” he says. “What differentiate us from others is the ethos. Everyone wants it to work, we’re all part of something and everybody’s going for it.”
Facey says he’s not going to sell the business, but is setting up a trust for its continuation, saying: “There are good people here who can run the business.”
Gripple’s innovation department has also spun out Loadhog – a packaging solutions company, born from a relationship with a US customer that wanted to use the Gripple Hang-Fast to secure photocopiers to pallets. Loadhog develops patented solutions to packaging problems.
Also in: February 2009
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