Gill Southern, Director, Wessington Cryogenics

May 17 2010 by John Hill, The Journal

Gill Southern Southern and her family brought their business back from the brink to award-winning growth. The champion of North East manufacturing tells John Hill how they did it.

GILL Southern and her brother Paul Rowe share an office at the Wessington Cryogenics base in Houghton-le-Spring.

Paul is a born-and-bred engineer and Gill handles what he sometimes calls the “waffle”, the work on business development and lean manufacturing that has been implemented around the company’s new premises on Gadwall Road.

She says: “We share a small corner office. I suppose we could have set up anywhere in the building, but it works best that way.

“He’s hell-bent on the engineering side and I come in talking about business improvement and new opportunities. We work really well in a business together because we’re complete opposites.”

The siblings have now effectively assumed day-to-day control of the cryogenics company, following the semi-retirement of their father, company founder Eddie Rowe. However, their routes to that particular corner office have been very different.

Gill says: “My brother was an engineer, so it was a natural fit for him to join his father’s company.

“I always knew I wanted to do that one day as well, and I told my father on a number of occasions that I’d like to be part of the company when the time was right. But I would only join if I felt I had something useful to offer.

“The idea of joining a company just because your family happened to have it didn’t seem to be the right thing for me to do. I realised that any role I had would have to be very different, and I wanted to make sense of what that would be.

“I was interested in business development and sales and project management. My career path might seem quite random, but looking back you can see where you picked up the skills that would help you later on.”

Wessington Cryogenics has been part of Rowe family life since 1984, when Eddie Rowe decided to take advantage of a surge in industrial applications for cryogenics.

Gill says: “It was typical of my dad that he took that bold step. He left a well-paid job to set up the company.

“He’s been someone that’s inspired me over the years. He’s a passionate engineer and the very definition of an entrepreneur. He thought we’d grown up enough to take the risk.

“I remember the excitement of the business starting. On the first day, he went to a unit in Crowther, switched on the lights, put out the tables and chairs and was ready to go. He got his first export order on the first day, and thought it was such a doddle that he went off for a round of golf in the afternoon. He didn’t get another order for three months.

“For 26 years, there have been some incredibly exciting times and some incredibly challenging times. I grew up with the real-life thrills and spills, and the knowledge of the risks you have to take. It’s about wondering how you’re going to pay for wages and materials. It’s a gritty education.

“What my father shared with me was the wizardry of it, the imagination you need to design and build something.

“We get excited seeing raw steel cut at one end of the factory and turned into some of the most incredible products. We’ve got tanks up Mount Everest and products at the South Pole.

“You can really understand what gave my dad the drive to start it all in the first place.”

However, Gill wasn’t destined to join the company until much later. First, she cut her teeth in the world of banking, working for NatWest Bank in roles including general banking, securities and lending and sales and marketing.

She smiles: “I thought the last thing I wanted to do was work in banking but that’s where I found myself. I developed a good all-round apprenticeship. For me, it was all about learning skills in sales and marketing, project management and international finance.”

In 1995, she left NatWest to join the University of Sunderland, where she managed several European-funded projects involving collaboration between industry and education. Her largest project involved developing and managing a £6m One North East initiative on behalf of all five regional universities, in which the aim was to recruit graduates to key areas within Nissan and 10 of its supply chain companies to share skills, experience and technology. Each graduate was mentored by a regional academic.

She adds: “It gave Sunderland University a chance to demonstrate its capabilities to manage a very large-scale recruitment project.

“We recruited 30 graduates and selected a two-year project for each of the graduates, which were completely diverse but based on business process improvement.

“You really saw the challenges the company was facing and how fresh thinking and fresh knowledge could be brought in to enhance business processes. There were some terrific achievements.”

Gill became assistant director of business development at the university, leading a team responsible for income generation, sales and marketing and building relationships with partners in the UK and beyond.

“I was looking and learning all the time about the benefit of new technology and fresh ideas,” she enthuses.

“From looking at the challenges faced by companies such as Nissan, you could see examples of business knowledge that could be used in much smaller organisations.”

In 2005, Gill had the opportunity to apply her skills to the family business. The firm was facing financial difficulties, and Gill was able to put her father and brother in touch with experts that would help the company to adjust some of its business processes. The company also switched banks to get access to more comprehensive export credit insurance.

She says: “There was a 280% rise in the price of steel and because the clients were blue-chip we were locked into long-term pricing agreements. We were doing contracts at a loss, yet we had a very long order book. It meant that we were really looking at our future survival.

“I introduced the company to some of the best practice engineers that were available. It’s difficult when change happens and I had to persuade my father and brother that this new thinking was worth looking at.

“We chose one product with a good order book and completely revisited the way we manufactured that product. We went from being able to make 10 a month to 20.

“A lot of the delays were typically caused by hanging around waiting for things like overhead cranes, as part of the job involved turning the tank so that each section could be welded. We put the tank on a rolling track. It was all about simple changes like that.

“All I brought was a bit of fresh thinking. There was such a fantastic team effort at the time. At that time, people treated us as more than just a job. They put tremendous effort into making sure we got the work out and that we would survive.

“We were a company that was suffering a temporary glitch. Not only did we bounce back but we had the most successful five-year period in our history.”

Gill took up the role of director at the company in 2007. She is now responsible for lean manufacturing, human resource management, health and safety and operational improvement.

The company designs and builds storage and transport tanks for use in cryogenics, and has built up a turnover of £10m thanks to orders from clients such as Nasa, Haliburton and the Ministry of Defence. It now employs more than 100 staff, and moved into a new premises in Rainton Bridge South in January.

Wessington Cryogenics is now heavily involved in the oil and gas sectors and sells 80% of its output overseas. In March it was named Durham and Wearside Company of the Year 2009 at the latest nebusiness awards, organised by The Journal in association with Business Link.

Gill said: “I know what can be achieved because I’ve seen it work. I’m learning about what’s happening inside Wessington, and I have to have the quiet patience and determination to bring in some of the changes that I’d like to see happen.

“We’re looking at one or two prototypes for new products and even if only one is successful it could mean further expansion into new premises or filling the space we have at present.

“I think the business will explore new sectors and will continue to expand and look forward to growing in terms of turnover. We will be involved with regional projects on clean fuels for sure.

“You hear these doom and gloom stories about manufacturers, but people in the industry are forming world-class products from scratch. It’s so much more active than people give it credit for.

“The skills that have come from our heritage are an absolute gift. If businesses are willing to establish new learning and new procedures, they can fall back on these superb manufacturing skills. We can’t rely on an ageing workforce so we need to take the best of the learning from the past, establish new methodologies and support apprenticeships and training to develop the next generation.

“You can almost see it coming back full circle, with re-training programmes in traditional metalworking skills. That’s what’s going to be needed with these huge wind farms that are being set up.”

Gill insists there is “still so much work to do” to embrace all of the possible opportunities for the company, which has explored a number of uses for its products over the years.

She says: “We always say that if someone walks into the factory, we’ll be able to find an application no matter what business they’re in.

“It’s the widget in a pint of Guinness. It’s used in artificial racehorse breeding. People are using cryotherapy to treat sport injuries and things like bipolar depression. It’s used in the creation of the holograms on banknotes, and we’ve supplied products used to provide special effects for Roman Abramovich’s nightclub in Red Square.

“Thousands of dollars are being spent in the States on submerging bodies for deep-freezing. The myth of Walt Disney being frozen is just a myth, but there are lots of others.

“People are even doing it on a budget and freezing their heads because they think that they can be unfrozen at some point and attached to something.”

Gill balances her work responsibilities with her life as a mother. Her daughter Victoria, 19, is attending York St John University, while her son Dan, 14, is exploring the company via work experience.

“I try to switch off and have a good work/life balance,” she says. “I’ve probably got the same friends that I’ve had since I was a young kid. I do what everyone else likes to do. I’m a bit of a slave to junior league football and I love to just unwind with friends and eat at nice restaurants.

“My brother and his wife are adrenaline junkies and are world-class competitive skydivers. I’m an absolute wimp when it comes to any sort of excitement, but I did go white water rafting recently and loved it.”