Dianne Sharp arrived in the North East at the age of 18 with a passion for maths and a lot of ambition. In a conversation with John Hill, she talks about making Prudhoe's SCM Pharma into a worldwide powerhouse.

WE’RE midway through a hot drink at a Newcastle Costa when Dianne Sharp starts talking about taking over the world.

It’s not unusual for dreams to wisp up from coffee conversation, but this apparently isn’t the only time SCM Pharma’s managing director has brought this up.

“At meetings, people wait for me to mention the global domination thing”, she says. “I wouldn’t expect anything less. It’s a global business and we’ve developed specific knowledge and capabilities around difficult and dangerous drugs.

“If you’re just looking at the UK, you’re looking at a niche inside a niche inside a niche.”

SCM Pharma demerged from Northumberland’s Specials Laboratory in 2008, and expects sales to clear £4m this year. It has opened a US office and is looking at projects in Japan and Scandinavia with help from UKTI.

Sharp arrived at the company early last year after a decade with County Durham electrical component maker Mechetronics.

She says: “There’s a fundamental shift happening in the pharmaceutical industry. Large pharmaceutical companies have got to look at ways to reduce costs. You’ve seen divestment of manufacturing sites they don’t need, and some are even outsourcing research. It’s allowing us to become an industry of experts in our field.

“The people we’re dealing with may be experts in what they do, but they’re trusting us, so it’s about building trust and communication.

“When a project is active, it’s not unusual for us to have weekly teleconferences with a client. It’s a business about people after all.”

When Sharp was appointed last year, SCM co-owner Fiona Cruickshank praised her “excellent track record of building and running efficient, high-growth businesses”. But Sharp says: “It’s not about what I know. It’s about realising what my weaknesses are and bringing together a team better than me, because they’re the ones that do the real work. I just swan around looking important.

“I’m very hard to work for,” she says, smiling. “I’m fair, but very demanding. I can’t be doing with namby pambies. You’ve got to have some gumption, a bit of oomph, some drive and imagination.

“Technical capability is a given, but it’s about understanding and adhering 100% to the rules but also being imaginative and creative.”

While creativity and drive are themes that feature heavily in Sharp’s business ethos, at its heart is her passion for learning.

When she was managing director at Mechetronics, she instituted a policy where the company would support its employees if they wished to take a college course. If it was a personal course, the firm would cover fees and employees would pay them back in instalments. If it was a course beneficial to work, the company often paid all fees itself.

“The emotional contract I have with staff members is they should leave as more than when they came in, whether that’s from the experience or from additional learning,” she says. “We spend more of our lives at work than we do with our families. That has to be for something.

“I believe passionately about learning. If you’re learning, you’re opening your mind to change.”

As a teenager growing up in a suburb of north east London, Sharp had already chosen her career.

“I wanted to be a maths teacher,” she says. “I love maths. You can slave away for ages doing an essay, and then it’s all about opinion? Do me a favour. I can do a set of algebraic equations and I’m either right or wrong. I wanted people to feel the same about maths as I did.

“When I was 14, it was the time of the teachers’ strike, so they weren’t covering for absent teachers. Our maths teacher was on long-term sick that year, so we missed a lot of maths lessons.

“My mum and dad paid for maths tuition for me, which they could ill afford to do. I became disillusioned with the idea of teaching.

“I believe teachers should be like the police in that they shouldn’t be allowed to strike, because you can’t get those precious years of a child’s education back.

“You look at poor communities and it’s their school environment and their education that gives them a road out. You can’t play with that.”