Lifelong dream of success on the pitch

Jan 25 2010 By Peter McCusker, The Journal

Third-generation Tyneside boiler-maker Graham Wood built and sold two successful American companies. Now he is pouring his energy and money into his hometown football club, writes Peter McCusker.

WHEN the chance came to lead the management buy-out of the heating company that he worked for, Gateshead-born Graham Wood was first senior manager in the queue.

As the main instigator of the move, Wood, who had just turned 40, moved up from works director to managing director of Sheffield-based Trianco-Redfyre when the deal was completed. And within months he had opened a US branch and fulfilled an ambition he had nurtured since first spotting an opportunity to make boilers for the United States market five years earlier. Within a few years he had bought out his three business partners and launched a second US boiler business.

By the time he had sold these two businesses for a combined sum of over £20m 10 years later, he had been vice-chairman of Sunderland Football club and had relocated his family to the other side of the Atlantic.

In his mid-50s, rich, successful and with no need to work, although still interested in doing so, he was spending half of his time living in the States and half in London.

But in 2005 he sold his American property and returned to London to take a more hands-on role as chairman of a London semi-professional football club.

Two years later he left the capital and the leafy environs of the Hampton and Richmond Borough FC to return home to Gateshead Football Club, nurturing hopes of seeing it return to the Football League.

There is little doubt that returning Gateshead to the Football League is now Wood’s burning ambition. His fondness for the club goes back to his childhood and is intensified by fans’ bitterness at dropping out of the league half a century ago.

Despite an average placing of ninth in 23 lower league campaigns, and having applied for re-election on only one previous occasion, Gateshead were unceremoniously dumped from the elite in 1960.

Wood, now 65, recalls: "It was a huge disappointment and it should never have happened to Gateshead. It was devastating.

"I had been following them for five seasons of league football and we were getting good crowds, an average of 7,000.

"Although we had only been established in the town since 1930, and many people were supporting Newcastle by then, we could still attract crowds of 14,000 for the bigger games."

The biggest game in the club’s history was in 1953 against Bolton Wanderers when the "Heed" lost to a Nat Lofthouse goal in front of a crowd of 17,652 at Redheugh Park in the quarter final of the FA Cup.

Wood remembers the queue of women that formed at the Town Hall to buy tickets for the menfolk who were all at work and couldn’t get the time off to get their own tickets.

Wood recalls: "At the time we believed we would get back into the league the following season, but it never happened.

"We were replaced by Peterborough and may people thought it was for geographical reasons. We were well-supported. It was a disgrace."

Wood’s determination to return Gateshead to the Football League is almost tangible and both he and vice-chairman Brian Waites recently unveiled plans to build a new 9,000 capacity stadium in the town centre to accommodate their dreams.

Apart from Gateshead few things seem to speed his measured speech. But his enthusiasm is demonstrated again when he relives his eagerness to lead the MBO of the boiler company he worked for back in 1984.

The journey to company owner started in Gateshead 40 years earlier. He is the third in a line of family boiler-makers with his father and paternal grandfather both serving their time at Clarke Chapmans in Gateshead.

And he followed that career path with an apprenticeship at Baker Perkins in Hebburn and completed it a Northern Welding company in Northampton. By 1984 he had progressed to works director of Trianco-Redfyre in Sheffield.

"I always had an ambition to own my own business, but I had never quite found the right opportunity and when the chance came to buy Trianco-Redfyre from parent company Central and Sheerwood, I knew straight away this was it," he says.

"I was the works director at the time but I led the whole process for the four of us and after the buy-out became the managing director.

The quartet purchased Trianco-Redfyre Ltd (TRL) for £3.7m and in the same year the MBO team established a new company Trianco Inc in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

"US boilers were like their cars. They were very inefficient. Five years earlier I had been part of a project that had looked at the US market where most of the boilers were powered by oil.

"In 1979 the price of oil rose from 30 cents a gallon to $1.20 a gallon and we looked at making boilers fuelled by anthracite. However by the time we had a product ready the price of oil had come back down and the project was shelved.

"One of the first things we did on buying the company was to establish this US base. It was basically an old barn which we rented for 50 cents a square foot. We made the boilers in the UK and shipped them out to the US.

"We chose that part of the States because there are large reserves of anthracite in the Pennsylvania area. We sold 6,000 units in the first year and 9,000 by year three and we could really have sold them at a much higher price.

"The next step was to set up our manufacturing plant and in 1989 we got the chance to buy a high-efficient, gas-fired boiler company from Boston Gas which had been designed by professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I merged this with Trianco Inc which I purchased from TRL to establish Trianco-Heatmaker."

In 1994, after having previously bought out his MBO partners, Wood sold TRL to Bullough plc for £14m and moved to Massachusetts with wife Margaret and their sons David and Steven. Four years later he sold Trianco-Heatmaker to Teledyne Inc for US$10m.

Having run companies in the United States and the UK Wood says there is little to choose between the way business is done in the two countries but believes there is a greater can-do attitude in the States. He also thinks employment laws in the UK can be too restrictive on business owners.

Wood’s passion for football had been satiated in the 1990s following an invitation to become a director of Sunderland Football Club.

"I was a Sunderland fan, as well as a Gateshead fan, and had sponsored a couple of games through the business when Bob Murray (the then Sunderland owner) invited me into the boardroom and asked if I would like to become an associate director.

"I think I must have invested around £250,000 into the club, occasionally chipping in to buy a player, having once put up £100,000 for one player.

"But Gateshead was always my first love.

"Since selling the businesses I have thought about getting back into business and was close to buying a boiler company in Poole, before deciding against it at the last minute. But for me now Gateshead is almost a full-time job."

Gateshead currently play their home games in the town’s International Stadium, This is a spartan, utilitarian, almost Soviet-style building more suited to athletics than football.

Wood and Waites plan to build a new stadium in the town centre.

Their goal is to create a financially sustainable football club that will pay its own way by letting commercial office space that will be built into the stadium.

"This will be my legacy to my home town," added Wood.

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