Profile I Paul Deehan
Playing the long game
From Birmingham City FC apprentice to running a £40m business, Neil Tyler talks tactics with Paul Deehan, the Managing Director of AWS Electronics Group
L
ast year proved to be a pretty good year for the AWS Electronics Group, one of Europe's leading specialist
electronics manufacturing (EMS) providers. The company, which is able to offer services that cover the whole electronic product life cycle, whether that’s design or low cost manufacturing or contract service and repair, saw its revenues increase and new customers signed. A very healthy position for a company that got through the recession of 2008-10 with revenues holding steady at over £30m - a real success considering how tough the market was and still remains. AWS’s Managing Director, Paul Deehan, points to the company’s ability to meet and respond to the needs of its various customers for its success. The Group, which he acquired in a management buy- in/buy-out in 2005, through a programme of acquisition is able to provide a broad range of high level technical capabilities and leading edge production technologies that tend to be associated with much larger companies and, as is so often with successful companies, an approach to customer service that emphasizes personal service and partnership. “We work hard with and for our customers, few if any of whom went under last year. We’ve obtained a number of new business wins that are at the high end of the market and I’m expecting revenues to rise to £40m this year. Our margins have been squeezed but that’s no different from any of our competitors,” Deehan explains.
Among the company’s key markets are defence, homeland security, medical equipment and oil and gas. “Things are looking positive at the moment and customers are pleased with the work we do for them. We‘ve seen new wins in instrumentation and in industrial control but I don’t tend to focus the business on specific vertical markets, rather AWS is all about complex high value engineering whatever the sector. But a lot of what we do does involve working with mission critical products.” A lot of the company’s customers are based in the UK because they’re looking
18 February 2012
for flexibility and that is, according to Deehan, a key strength of AWS. “When you focus on the kind of complex technical devices that we do you need to be able to offer flexibility whether in terms of time lines, in managing the engineering work or being able to manage delays or addressing other technical issues.”
The company has a number of factories
across the UK and recently opened a new facility in Slovakia. Ultimately the company will open, according Deehan, a facility in the Far East.
A tactical period
“The last few years have been a tactical period for most companies. It’s been about the day-to-day management of the business but that hasn’t prevented us from planning for the future. We’ve continued to invest, have a strong technology road- map and have all the necessary accreditations in place. That builds confidence in the company and will enable us to expand further.”
And that expansion could be significant. When Deehan became the managing director and controlling shareholder back in 2005 the company was turning over just over £12m. “We managed to take a lot of costs out of the business, we restructured our operations and managed stock more effectively. While there were some job losses you have to remember that this business is all about supporting your customers and if you cut to far and to deep that suffers.”
In the two years that followed the company made a number of acquisitions, five in total. “We’ve now got a mature business here that can trade and market itself as a group. We’ve ridden out the worst of the recession and I think we’re in a very strong position going forward,” Deehan believes. Deehan has spent his entire life in manufacturing. Throughout the 1980s and the best part of the 1990s he worked at Land Rover and Jaguar rising from the shop floor to very senior operational management roles before moving on to
Components in Electronics Paul Deehan
the Lear Corporation, a major automotive supplier. “I learned so much from working in the automotive industry. I saw the value of strong leadership and the importance of having a strategic sense of direction, a vision if you like. There was a lot of industry consolidation and acquisitions were rife and I got a wonderful education in business culture.”
But that is only part of the story. What is
so impressive about Deehan is that he literally worked his way up from the shop floor. He started by sweeping the floors and through hard graft, educating himself at night school and by sheer bloody- minded determination, and he’s the first to admit, a degree of luck, he’s now running a £40m business.
Professional footballer “I was going to be a professional footballer, like my brother John, and was an apprentice at Birmingham City in the 1980s. But unlike my brother who played for Aston Villa and Norwich, I wasn’t good enough. I ended up at Jaguar, where my father worked, and literally was employed to sweep up. From there I moved onto the
production line. However, at the tender age of 22 I asked for a meeting with my manager. I wanted to be in management and I was lucky. The manager I approached, a wonderful guy, Dave Hudson, saw something in me. Drive, ambition, sheer bloody cheek I really don’t know but he saw something and chose to help and mentor me. This was a time when the workforce and management weren’t getting on particularly well, so I was lucky. He could have just shut the door on me but, instead, he took me under his wing and advised me to get an education if I wanted to make something of myself. So I went back to college and ended up in management.” Deehan’s mentioning of his father is a poignant moment in the interview. His father died last year and it obviously is still very raw for him to talk about. “My parents came over from Ireland when there was no work available to them. We were from a very poor background and my father had very little formal education, but what he was able to provide, in abundance, was wisdom and a philosophy of respecting the people around you. He believed passionately that
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