CEO DIARIES
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role as an industry leader? I am chief executive of the WH Scott Group, a family of specialist lifting, engineering and inspection businesses working across Ireland and the UK. We are headquartered in Rathnew, County Wicklow, and operate from both islands – Belfast, Dublin, Cork, Laois, Wexford, London, Plymouth, Bristol, Reading, Yeovil, Southampton and South Wales. Over the past ten years we have strategically acquired a number of long-established names: Hiltonne Engineering, Re-Ropes, Metlab, Hutcheon Examination Services, Premier Lifting, RHC Lifting, Infrastruct and, most recently, Workplace Inspection Services. Between them we employ more than 300 people. We have since rebranded and brought the group under three market-facing brands, each with a clear specialism: WH Scott, Re-Ropes and Metlab. It was an exciting project, and we are very happy with the outcome. My job is no longer to specify a sling or strip a gearbox. It is to put the right people in the right places, to allocate
capital sensibly, and to protect the one asset that actually holds a business like ours together – the credibility of our name on a certificate. When a customer accepts one of our reports, they are handing us a piece of their own risk. Growth is only worth having if that trust survives it. I am wary of the phrase industry leader, if I am honest. What I would say is that anyone running a business in this sector carries a duty that goes beyond their own profit and loss account. We work in a corner of engineering where the consequences of getting it wrong are immediate and physical. That obliges you to argue for standards even when it costs you an order, to train more people than you strictly need this year, and to be straight with customers about what they are actually buying. If I have one job as a leader in this industry, it is to make sure safety sits at the centre of everything we do – and that the message carries all the way through our organisation and out to our customers.
Can you tell us how you got into this industry, and why? I was born in Rathnew, to farming parents – the same small village on the east coast of Ireland that the group is headquartered in today. I grew up in a brilliant, chaotic house with 13 brothers and sisters, eight boys and six girls, and we are all still great friends. My mother pushed education and manners. My father pushed Irish football. Nobody was pushing lifting equipment, and nobody
anywhere else was either. Nobody grows up wanting to work in lifting. It is on no careers noticeboard and in no school prospectus, which is one of the sector’s genuine problems. Like almost everyone here, I arrived sideways. I started locally, with a steel wire rope manufacturer that had British Ropes as a shareholder for a period. From there I moved into cranes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then, in 1995, to the Gunnebo Group – the undisputed kings of quality at that time. Eventually I bought their Irish company, WH Scott & Son Engineering, together with my partners Urban Hedman, Anthony Franey and Mark Hitchen, and we set out with a plan to be best in class. The partners have moved on over the years, but every one of them played a large part in what the WH Scott Group is today.
What makes your company stand out? The obvious answer is longevity – 129 years of it, which very few businesses in this sector can claim. The company was founded in Belfast in 1897 by William Hill Scott and his son, who started out as boilermakers. But heritage on its own does not win work, and I would not want it to. Customers do not buy 1897.
What actually distinguishes us is breadth held to a single standard. Most customers with a mixed asset base end up with one supplier for lifting gear, another for statutory examination, another for materials and non-destructive testing, another for structural inspection – and four different reporting formats to reconcile. We have deliberately built a group that covers that whole span: supply of lifting and safety equipment; design and fabrication; statutory inspection under LOLER, PUWER, PSSR and COSHH; crane and hoist service; lift roping through Re-Ropes; and materials testing and NDT through Metlab. One relationship, one set of records.
Opposite page: With 129 years in the business, WH Scott Group covers the whole span of lifting.
www.hoistmagazine.com | September 2026 | 17
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