Paul Deehan I Profile
through hard work you would succeed and you made you own luck. Whether a good manager in business or football, for that matter, he encouraged me to listen and learn by watching those I respected. “Wherever you work there are always going to be directors or managers who make a difference. They’re respected and there’s something about them. My father taught me to find them out and then watch and learn from them. By the age of 28 I was running a big part of a factory. In the 1980s there were very few people under the age of forty doing that.“
Even in his early twenties Deehan had ambitions to become a general manager or director within the automotive industry, ultimately he wanted to be a business owner.
“I was continuously looking at what I needed to achieve to reach the next level in order to develop my career. I was constantly looking ahead and planning for the next five years and was determined to get to where I wanted to be. To be focused and to work hard were things I learned from my father.”
Driven
Deehan was certainly driven, perhaps because his first love - football - had been denied him. Money, according to him, was never the key driver. “If you’re successful other forms of success, money included, will come to you. If I’d solely focused on making money I think I would have failed. Success comes from a belief in yourself and in those you surround yourself with.”
Deehan worked at Jaguar and Land Rover for over fourteen years before being approached to work for the automotive supplier Lear.
“I was headhunted to run a factory in
West Bromwich, At 32 it seemed like a great opportunity. While I was there I was given responsibility for opening and closing factories across Europe; it was a period of considerable consolidation in the industry.”
I ask him how he dealt with the human cost of having to close a factory. “It’s never easy - it should never be easy - and was very difficult for me. I was accused of being an asset stripper which was hard to handle. I relied on my experience of working with the trade unions at Land Rover and Jaguar but more importantly was determined to do everything that I could for those people that we had to make redundant, and that wasn’t just lip service, I meant it. In one example I set up job shops, worked closely with local job centres and got around 80 per cent of the people we made redundant re-employed. Even the local MP, who was totally opposed to the factory’s closure, said that we’d created a model that others should follow.”
Encouraged to study Deehan took a
degree in business studies part of which involved courses in industrial psychology, that is in his words “what makes people tick!”
“On reflection studying that was a great help. At the time the notion of studying this kind of thing wasn’t taken that seriously in the UK and I don’t think I appreciated its value, but it’s helped me to
structure the teams I have put in place around me. “At AWS we’ve acquired a number of
different companies and a common culture, which is vital to a successful business, wont be created over night. A good team needs to be balanced and you need to have the right mix in place. As an MD I think you need to be good at blending different types of people together and they need to be able to trust one another and be able to depend on those they work with. “Our focus at AWS is on the customer and for that approach to work every aspect of the business needs to perform equally well. Whether that’s procurement, manufacturing, despatch or account management only if all those separate functions work together will you then get an effective result.” Trust and empowerment are key issues for Deehan. “Both are so important. I need to know when there are problems and I need to be sure that we act to solve them. I don’t need to micro-manage but I like to think I run a ‘no surprises’ culture.”
Buying AWS The decision to buy AWS followed a number of years working as a director at the outsourcing company Aktrion, in which he’d bought a minority stake following a successful buyout after deciding to leave Lear.
“I always wanted to be a business owner and when the opportunity arose with Aktrion I took it . I’d had conversations with a number of people
and decided to put my hand in my pocket. I worked with that business for nearly five years and then wanted to strike out on my own and do something different.” Selling his stake in Aktrion gave Deehan the financial security he needed in order to take the time he needed to find the right company to buy.
“I was well advised by a number of financial institutions who helped me as I searched for a UK CEM. I wanted to find a business with turnover above £30m but couldn’t find many at the time. Very few had a turnover in excess of £10m. I was looking for a business that I could grow and which had some genuine manufacturing capabilities but for it to succeed it would need to get some scale with a global supply chain and that could then be grown through acquisition.” Deehan put together a detailed business plan and was introduced to AWS’s then managing director Derek Fulluck. “A match made in heaven,” according to Deehan. Both agreed that a buy and build strategy was required and the rest is history.
“I’ve always listened and learned and
that’s no different today than from when I started out on the shop floor. “I love hard work and to me business is
a hobby. The key to success is communication. You have to ensure that the company’s key objectives are understood at board level and then cascaded down through the business.” With revenue rising and new customers coming on stream football’s loss has been this manufacturer’s gain. ■
www.cieonline.co.uk
Components in Electronics
February 2012 19
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