028 INTERVIEW
“We knew we should talk to Adrian; we had the same market philosophy and concluded that if we could achieve this merger it would be really fantastic. It became like Utopia and there was a real chemistry.” - Fokko Smeding
As the taxi turned into an industrial estate in the Groningen satellite town of Leek, I sensed I was about come face to face with rigging royalty, as the distinctive tri- node Prolyte logo seemed to be emblazoned from every building on every corner. That very phrase ‘rigging royalty’ would have been unthinkable 30 years ago - an oxymoron supreme - before early frontiersmen started converting workhorse / utility scaff into stylish high-tensile anodised aluminium trussing with an alchemist’s touch. Prolyte founder, Fokko Smeding wasn’t among these pioneers - but his Eureka moment came in the early 1990s; that’s when members of his team adapted an existing tapered coupling principle to develop a universal separate conical connector that was not dependent on traditional male / female interlocking, and at the same time gave a rigid fix where previous spigot based devices had left ‘play’ and movement in the joint. “We didn’t realise we had gold in our hands at the time,” admits Prolyte’s long- serving Head of Marketing, Marina Prak. But they certainly do today. Their merger last Autumn with Yorkshire-based Litestructures, fomenting Fokko’s long-standing relationship with LS founder Adrian Brooks, took the industry by surprise but has created wonderful synergies and is proving to be a perfect example of joined up thinking that will keep the Group competitive. The prize for Fokko, and his Technical Director Marc Hendriks, was the enormous production plant set up from scratch by Adrian in Slatina, Romania, which had been working well within its capacity. The Prolyte men knew that if they relocated half of their production they could compete on the world market with companies in low cost-base countries - from China to the Czech Republic - and road-truck to destinations via strategic distribution bases. Explaining his rationale, the Prolyte CEO said: “I had become concerned by imported products of inferior quality coming in from the east at lower prices and we were losing market share. We needed to do something about it. A lot of the companies in China had a low overhead and adding the production plant in Slatina to our production capacity would offer us the solution to drastically reduce costs of Prolyte.” Adrian had already set up the model for his Walmart-style, “only a truck drive to market” principle, while from Coca Cola he had also learnt that having the man who extrudes the trussing based right next door to the plant would eliminate transport costs entirely. Situated 200km west of Bucharest Slatina was the aluminium capital of eastern Europe, while further west a strategic base had been set up in Emsdetten, Germany many years before. Yet far from being a predatory move by Prolyte, this had been a long-considered
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process; a slow-burn which had started with the suggestion that Litestructures might rent Prolyte some of their production capacity to overcome the company’s pricing problems. But ideas have a habit of germinating rapidly. “We knew we should talk to Adrian; we had the same market philosophy and concluded that if we could achieve this merger it would be really fantastic. It became like Utopia and there was a real chemistry,” exclaimed Fokko enthusiastically. The move could scarcely have been better timed. The constant slog backwards and forwards to the Romanian hinterland was already taking its toll on Adrian Brooks, who was simultaneously undertaking PLASA Chairman duties, succession planning for Litestructures on the one hand (with his sons waiting in the wings), while on the other building Europe’s largest purpose-built arena production rehearsal facility (Litestructures Live). While Prolyte’s astonishing progress gathers even greater momentum - they will achieve a 40% increase in turnover this year - it has also rejuvenated Adrian who takes on a business development and group strategy overseeing role as a member of the main supervisory board. He is a man whom Fokko and Marina perceive as “a brilliant natural spokesman for the company”. While one son, Lee, will continue as MD of Litestructures in Wakefield, his other son, Ben, will run LS-Live (as the studio, set and stage and hire division is now called), which is exempt from the merger. Thus Litestructures becomes one of four divisions in the Group (the other core brands being ProlyteStructures, StageDex and ProLyft). And while Prolyte remains a utility trussing, staging and liftgear company, Litestructures - inventors of the aluminium trussing system (as Lighting Tower Hire’s Astralite system back in around 1982) - are much more focused on creative design and projects. In Fokko’s words: “We are probably more technical, and sell more roofs and load bearing solutions, while Wakefield is selling design solutions and will become the centre of our group-wide retail and architectural business. In both camps there is a lot of knowledge and the mindset is in the same direction.” And importantly, just as Litestructures became immersed in a culture of extrusions and castings when they arrived in Romania, so Prolyte could rely on its own local resource - with Groningen’s burgeoning North Sea offshore industry offering a rich resource of welders in a low-overhead region of the country. Yet trussing had been the last thing to occupy Fokko’s mind until it became an essential commodity. Like many refugees from the disco / DJ technology boom that had sustained technicians through the late ‘80s, Fokko Smeding had been running a small rental company up in the north of Holland, dry hiring sound systems, and occasionally selling kit from a small shop. A typical rig back then
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