Friends in high places - Director Michael Brown, right, meets the Minister of State for Transport Chris Heaton-Harris. STEELY RESOLVE Metal and Modular makes robust workshop equipment, but a clever new
system has made a positive impact and transformed the range. Andy met Directors Michael and Irene Brown to get the full story.
A
great deal of my time is spent visiting hire companies, manufacturers and
suppliers located on workaday industrial estates. However, Metal and Modular’s HQ in rural Northamptonshire is about as pleasant a locale as you might wish for. The company occupies a number of units that might otherwise be mistaken for an extended farmstead, and there’s little hint from the outside as to the industry within. That itself hasn’t always entailed the manufacture of sturdy and adaptable equipment, as the name suggests. Michael Brown begins with a brief history of the business:
“We started out providing mechanical work on building sites. It’s very difficult being a sub-contractor, and we were hit by a major client who went into liquidation owing us a considerable sum - we didn't get a penny of it.
“My own history is in sheet metal. I worked for Ford when I left school and got all my diplomas. However, when we were doing our own mechanical work I started to look at the vaults and cabinets that we’d been hiring at great expense, and which would inevitably get damaged on site, and my brother and I started designing and making our own basic units.
“At the same time as we were doing this work, my wife Irene and I also had a document management and scanning business called ‘Mitech’. This ran successfully for 26 years, with clients including Ancestry, Roche and Bloomberg.
The newly designed SureLock Pro cutting station.
“Mitech helped us to stay afloat when a major contractor went into administration. However, there was one debt that we just couldn't settle. We still had all our equipment, so my son and I went to see the directors
and I suggested that we could manufacture products in lieu of the bill. We made a few pipe racks to prove our worth, and the client ordered 24 of them. They asked if we had any other items, so we made a small selection to show them. More orders followed and that’s basically how we got started.”
‘‘ We began to think
about what we were doing to the planet and what we could do to help
Metal and Modular’s functional website voices a certain frustration with ‘traditional’ manufacturing also being an influence in the formation of the company. I wondered what else there was to say about that?
’’
“When you hire or buy equipment, you find that it’s only about 80% right, except for a small flaw. You think to yourself, if they just made a small change it’d be so much better. I find it so frustrating, so for us it’s about doing it right the first time,” Michael explains.
26 Executive Hire News - Nov/Dec 2021
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