THE EVOLUTION OF ADEY FROM INVENTION TO GLOBAL SUCCESS

By Nicky Godding, Editor

Almost 20 years ago, a British gas engineer based in Cheltenham reckoned he could improve the e ciency and performance of every central heating system.

So Chris Adey designed a magnetic filter which did just that.

Since then, the company he founded, Adey Professional Heating Solutions, has sold millions of his original product, MagnaClean, expanded its range and is employing around 300 people helping the company turn over more than £80 million a year.

Chris bowed out of the business in 2016 after a private equity-backed management buyout, and in 2021 the company was sold again, for £210 million

– back into the trade this time, to one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of piping, water and climate management systems. The company, Polypipe –which changed its name to Genuit soon after the purchase – is based in Leeds and is acquiring companies such as Gloucester-based Adey to become a leading provider of sustainable construction products and services

The sale back into industry has proved a winner for Genuit and Adey.

From law to commerce, learning all the way

However, to tell Adey’s story properly, we need to wind back before the pandemic and meet the man instrumental in its successful sale to Genuit and its subsequent growth.

Matthew Webber, who lives in Worcestershire, joined Adey in 2017 –the year after the management buyout, to run sales in the UK, and later Europe and North America.

The plumbing and heating industry wasn’t, unsurprisingly, his first choice of career. Matthew had studied law and marketing at Leicester University and planned to train as a barrister, following in the footsteps of his aunt, an immigration defence lawyer.

He spent a couple of months shadowing his aunt, acting as liaison with her clients. “We were trying to secure them the right to stay in the UK. Many were genuinely terrified about being harmed if they went home. You can’t act that stu and it really opened my eyes. And after dealing directly with people’s lives during the day, we’d head home to study late into the evening just to keep up with case law precedents.”

He even won mock bar trials two years in a row at Chelmsford Crown Court but didn’t enjoy academia as much as he’d hoped.

After backpacking around the world, he took the advice of friends and family who said he’d be great in a sales or commercial role and joined Fernox, the Slough manufacturer of water treatment and central heating products. There he stayed for nine years, before moving to Warwick-headquartered Wolseley UK Plumb and Parts Centre to run the company’s biggest region.

“Wolseley was a huge job, with a £400 million profit and loss, more than 1,000 people and hundreds of outlets. I was 35 when I started the job and learned more in three years there than probably anywhere else.”

Private equity spots potential

He joined Adey in 2017 as sales director, and it took LDC, the private equity company which had bought it, less than two years to spot his potential and ask him to take over as managing director.

One of his biggest early challenges was helping the company adapt from private ownership to private equity.

“It is inevitable that such a major change in ownership will impact company culture, and that proved to be the case at Adey,” he said. “Unless everyone in the business, from shop floor to the boardroom, understands what we are here for, where we are going and their part in that, the project just won’t work.”

Matthew upped the level of internal communications, made key personnel changes and introduced leadership and management training. This included away days to help bring the team together.

He remembers board members getting soaked on an away day after they o ered to cook a barbecue in the rain for the rest of the team. “The experience broke down barriers between management levels which had built up over the years,” he said.

This investment in management delivered almost immediate results when the pandemic hit in March, 2020.

“Because we’d built up a new level of trust, the team tackled the pandemic with more confidence,” said Matthew.

“We were all worried about job security, and while we had a nice cash balance in the bank at the beginning of the pandemic, we knew how quickly that would burn through.

“I was worried about our people, so we did regular online briefings – and still do. It helps keep everyone together.”

The same year Covid hit, Adey moved into a newly-built facility close to the M5 at Gloucester.

Adey’s evolution, bringing manufacturing in-house

“It wasn’t ideal timing, especially as, for the first time, we had brought manufacturing in-house. Most of our manufacturing is now done in Gloucester. It has boosted standards, given us control and was the next evolution for Adey.”

The new facility saw the company deliver its best financial results in the first quarter of 2020, and Adey’s private equity owners LDC planned to begin its sale.

But by the last week of March, more than £1 million worth of orders had been cancelled thanks to Covid and LDC delayed the sale to see how things would pan out. They needed have worried, orders rose again and by end of the year, the company carried over more than £5 million in sales.

“This slightly caught us out as because of the pandemic we’d slowed down and weren’t entirely ready for bounce-back. So that was tricky,” Matthew admitted.

Moving on, moving up as Adey welcomes new MD

With orders on the up again, LDC rebooted its plan to sell Adey because the business had proved highly resilient.

Matthew began meeting interested parties, firstly face-to-face – then the world went back into lockdown and the whole process was largely conducted online, until the final week.

And Adey wasn’t short of suitors.

“Selling to Polypipe, now Genuit, was a great result as the trade sector understands the industry and is in it for the long haul,” said Matthew. “In a world where every single cost has gone up significantly, that’s a positive.”

Matthew is now moving within the Genuit Group to head one of the group’s new business units. As Managing Director of its Climate Management Solutions division, of which Adey is a part, he will take on responsibility for more companies, including Nu-Heat in Honiton, Nuaire and Domus in Caerphilly, and Surestop in the West Midlands – a young company which has developed a product to protect properties from water damage.

In his place Matthew has appointed Helen Isherwood as Adey’s new Managing Director. Helen has been with the business for five years as Innovation Director and taken a leading role in the evolution of Adey’s products, services and operations.

“Helen is exceptional – strong and determined and wants to get on with the new job,” said Matthew.

“Genuit is a great company. It’s bought several businesses in the last few years, has 21 brands in total and a turnover of around £700 million. Adey has huge opportunities for growth. There are tens of millions of boilers in the UK alone without protection, chemicals or filters, so a big opportunity for us is in retrofitting products.

“Another growth area is in new boilers after Building Regulations (Part L) was updated in June 2022. One third of new boilers sold every year still don’t have chemicals or filters fitted.

“We are expanding our sales globally – for example last year we achieved growth of 20 per cent in North America.”

As Matthew’s successor, Helen is inheriting a great business, and she’s more than up for the challenge.