Ian Heskins, GWP Business Development Director, reflects on retirement

Ian Heskins, former New Business Development Director for GWP Group, and founder member of the business, has been reflecting on his time at the company.

With GWP having been purchased by Macfarlane Packaging back in March 2021, Ian felt it was the right time to step back after over three decades at the company.

He spoke about the early days of the business, the challenges the fledgeling company faced, the different stages the company has evolved through, and some memorable moments from the last 30 years.

1. How it all began
2. The highs and lows
3. Not what you expected…
4. Beyond GWP

Well, in 1987 I was 21 and had just finished a mechanical engineering apprenticeship and decided that was the thing I least wanted to do was to be an engineer. Mechanical engineering was a good background education, but it really wasn’t really something I wanted to pursue.

At the time what I wanted most in life was a shiny new company car, and I realised that the way to achieve that was becoming a sales rep. At the same time, David Pedley (one of the founders of GWP) moved in next door to my brother, Mike. Dave was a Sales Manager and happened to be looking for a trainee sales rep to sell corrugated around Swindon. And that pure chance became a 34 year career in packaging..!

The first company I worked for was called Brunel cases – this is pre-Great Western packaging – where I was initially a trainee sales rep, then a full sales rep and then an area sales manager. I really enjoyed my new job for the next few years and it only came to an end because of the Great Western Packaging opportunity.

I was invited to join GWP right at the very start. The company was founded by Charles Eatwell and David Pedley and they invited three others to join them, those being Ron Williams on production, Ruth (now CEO of GWP Group) in finance and administration and myself in sales. I feel very fortunate to have received that invitation and it’s an opportunity I’ll always be grateful for.

Brilliant fun… I think! Maybe it’s more fun looking back on it than it was at the time but it was very exciting, very busy and very varied as we grew from day one. I’d spend mornings out on the road selling and then maybe in the afternoon I’d be making deliveries and then in the evening, as we started to get busier and we had some bigger contracts in place, we had to run night shifts – there were times when we’d be running spool assembly machines for Raychem all through the night!

So it was really exciting and great fun as well as really tiring. All of those things. But above all, it was exciting.

Most and everybody, I guess, in different ways. There are very few I haven’t enjoyed working with.

The company to me has been through three different phases according to who’s been at the top.

Charles Eatwell was managing director for around 15 years from day one and as I’ve already said, the early days of the company were very enjoyable; Charles made it fun and he was very much a people-person so was able to form us into a real team, a small but close-knit team.

When Charles left, David Pedley took over as CEO and that phase became one of more entrepreneurially-driven growth. Dave’s natural talent is very much as an entrepreneur and in the job I have always done, sales and business development, that leadership style linked in very closely with my role. It was, again, a very exciting period but in a different way with strong growth, both organic and through acquisition. This was the period which professionally I probably enjoyed the most.

And then Dave went off for a few years (sailing around the world), Ruth took over the role of CEO and the performance of the business since has gone from strength to strength which is great to see. I feel very lucky to have seen it GWP evolve through those three phases and all three have been enjoyable in different ways.

Three things stand out in my mind. The first period I remember being difficult was from the late 90s. When GWP first set our local area, Swindon specifically, had a really strong manufacturing industry and you could drive on to any industrial estate and find a few decent sized customers for corrugated, which is all we did at the time and that made growing the business much easier than later on, because what happened around the turn of the millenium was a lot of that higher end manufacturing disappeared off to the Far East. Customers like Motorola, one of our largest at the time suddenly moved all their manufacturing out of Swindon. Also for every Motorola, there were another two or three smaller companies doing the same thing. So the downturn in local manufacturing was certainly what I would describe as our first significant challenge.

Then of course, we had the financial crisis in 2008, which was a pretty scary time and then just a few years ago we had a global pandemic! I’d say those three periods have been the most challenging.

I’d say that thankfully there have been very few. There have been, over the years, maybe three or four who we have had to fall out with for different reasons but they always tended to be smaller companies.

We’ve dealt with both big corporations and many smaller companies and they both have their benefits and downsides, but at least with the with the really big companies they tend to manage their suppliers in a far more strategic way, with agreed requirements, specifications and contracts and ultimately these things make everything run far more smoothly. In my experience problems are more likely to occur with start-up and smaller businesses but we’ve got much better at working with them over the years.

This would actually be a quite recent one. It goes back to around 2018 when I was invited to meet with and then present to a division of Siemens in Lincoln called Siemens Turbo Machinery, who manufacture jet engines for power generation. It was a very large-scale, complex brief requiring significant management as well as being quite a technical packaging challenge compared with the majority we’ve worked on over the years.

We were selling to technical as well as commercial people which isn’t uncommon but we knew that they were also talking with some of GWP Protective’s larger competitors so it certainly felt like an uphill battle. At the end of a long process of meetings, factory visits and presentations they chose GWP, which was very rewarding because we knew the strength of the competitors we were up against. I am quite proud of that one.

The most rewarding would probably have been when we were going through high growth during the middle-years through both acquisition and organic growth. There was a lot of hunger and ambition and focus on growth and that’s probably the period which I personally found the most rewarding.

I guess having played a small part in the success of a company from nothing through to a £25 million business and now a part of Macfarlane Group PLC. I feel both very fortunate and very proud to have been a part of that journey.

Over the last twelve years one of the more transformative aspects of business development I’ve had involvement with has been working with Matt (Dobson, GWP Marketing Manager) on moving GWP into the digital marketing space. I certainly don’t have the technical knowledge or ability to have done that myself, but provided both support and market/product knowledge which I hope has been of some value. Seeing the volume of new enquiries coming into GWP and the resulting growth we continue to achieve has been very satisfying.

It’s not a specific to GWP but it has to be COVID; I don’t think anyone saw that coming. A worldwide pandemic certainly wasn’t anything I expected to see in my lifetime. Of course it wasn’t just about the business but every aspect of life was affected, a very scary time. So that’s got to be the most unusual event.

I think the happiest memories would have to go back to it to its first ten years . It was just really good fun, really varied and everybody just rolled their sleeves up and got stuck into whatever needed doing. There was a really strong feeling of togetherness and teamwork.

Are we including company-related social activities outside of the business itself?

If so, I have to confess that on one director’s jolly in Scotland I was stood at the bar on New Year’s Eve, I think I was next to Cookie (Ian Cook, former Managing Director of GWP Conductive), when a completely unknown young lady came up behind both of us and lifted our kilts to see if we were genuine Scotsmen. I refuse to confess as to whether we were or not, but I think it’s something I will always look back on with a smile.

Just being a part of it, being a part of something which has been such a major part of my life for more than 30 years. I suppose your career is one of your foundations in life and having been a part of a company like GWP with its “zero to look where we are now” story has been very special. It still hasn’t really sunk in that it’s over!

Alarm clocks!

It’s probably not exactly what you might call a sexy industry in terms of its appeal to people who are considering their career options. But I’d suggest to them that they’re not put off and they do give it some serious consideration because it’s an industry full of variety, challenge and opportunity.

I found it quite an exciting industry to work in because of that variety and endless change. Also, over the years  I’ve been lucky enough to visit companies such as Aston Martin, Triumph Motorcycles, a few of the Formula One teams and also hi-fi speaker manufacturer, Bowers and Wilkins and they have all been absolutely fascinating to see. I’d say to anybody looking to enter the industry, don’t be put off by any preconceptions and just take a look at the markets we serve. That’s where my own fascination has come from.

Having two children with first class degrees. Goodness knows how that happened, it certainly wasn’t down to me!

Initially, typical early retiree plans, I guess. I certainly want to fulfil some travel ambitions with my wife, Teresa, especially European road trips. Even after all those thousands and thousands of miles I’ve spent driving up and down motorways for GWP over the last 34 years, I still have a passion for everything cars and driving-related but there are also a lot of bucket-list destinations to tick off the list such as Australia and New Zealand.

So I think what I’m most excited about is just simply owning my own time and being able to decide what to do with it. I have a couple of things I’m considering such as voluntary roles to give me a sense of purpose – becoming a magistrate interests me, for example.

Mrs H also has a list of jobs lined up for me at home, of course!

From all of Ian’s colleagues (past and present), peers, family and friends, we wish Ian a long and happy retirement.