10
NEWS
35TH ANNIVERSARY
Innovation is the key to Keystone Group’s sustained success
The Keystone Group is celebrating 35 years supplying innovative products to the construction sector, having grown rapidly to a £300m-plus turnover per annum company with over 2,000 employees across its 27 sites. Keystone Group brands include Keystone Lintels, IG Lintels and IG Masonry Support, as well as Keylite Roof Windows, Smartroof, Keyfi x, and Keywall, and recent acquisition Showersave, which manufactures waste water heat recovery systems in Holland. The company’s journey began in 1989 when chairman Sean Coyle founded Keystone Lintels in Cookstown, Northern Ireland. His vision was to create “smart construction solutions beyond equal that meet the evolving needs of the construction industry, alongside exceptional customer service.” Now the owner of 111 design patents, and with 125 staff dedicated to design and 35 product awards to its name, the company says this focus on innovation is “still at the heart of the Keystone Group 35 years later.” netMAGmedia was invited to attend the Group’s head offi ce in Cookstown, and spoke to various representatives from the fi rm’s divisions to hear about how it had innovated over the years to fi nd answers to industry problems and improve construction. We also heard from the group’s chief commercial offi cer (and son
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of the company’s founder) Sean Og Coyle, about the ambitious plans for this already successful fi rm.
He ascribed the rapid growth which the Keystone Group has enjoyed down to an approach of “putting the thought and the R&D and the effort into listening to customers, every time we launched something.” He said this rigorous approach had seen a series of “step changes” in the Group’s success over the years. Coyle said that the fi rm was initially founded on the basis of identifying a yawning gap in the steel lintel market, with no manufacturers at the time operating out of Ireland, and began manufacturing “specials” i.e. non-standard steel lintels, and was beating the competition by “turning them around in three to fi ve days.” This “took the business to another level,” added Coyle, and within a couple of years the fi rm was the market leader in Ireland. In 1997 Keystone expanded into England with a manufacturing site in Birmingham, before moving to a major facility in Swadlincote in 2002.
Keystone Group took a sideways strategic move into making roof windows in 2001, launching Keylite after spotting a “huge opportunity in the market,” with there being “no other manufacturer of roof windows in Western Europe.” Coyle said that currently, roof windows represents
a potential £250m market in the UK and €500 in France alone, giving a hit off further expansion: “It’s probably time for Keylite to explore and spread its wings in other countries.”
Coyle explained how a large measure of the other “step change” growth came via a strategic partnership with timber innovations fi rm Wyckham Blackwell Group in 2016. Following a series of further acquisitions this now encompasses 10 sub-brands with their own pre-existing solutions and ranges in the market. Coyle candidly admitted that in terms of Keystone Group’s own product launches, “not all of them always worked,” but “we were always innovating, and some really took off.” He added: “We never stood still or rested on our laurels.”
The company prides itself on succeeding based on “relentless innovation” within its own brands, resulting in 111 patents. However Coyle admitted that this can be “high-risk,” based on the investment required in their development, without any guarantee they will succeed commercially. Showersave, a recent acquisition as a innovative waste water heat recovery product solution, is one example of a pre- existing success which slots in extremely well in the UK context of the upcoming Future Homes Standard, which calls for effi cient low carbon solutions.
ADF SEPTEMBER 2024
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