Hugh Facey OBE, UK manufacturing legend

Hugh Facey OBE is Chairman of Gripple and of the Glide group. In 2014 Management Today ran an article on him entitled “Is Hugh Facey Britain’s best boss?” and he has appeared on BBC’s The One Show.

His career started at Tinsley Wire. He set out on his own with Estate Wire in 1984 and then sold it five years later to fund Gripple, the wire connector that he invented. 30 years on, the Glide group that he chairs is now some 1,000 strong and Gripple is known throughout the UK manufacturing sector as a pacesetter. Gripple is a hugely successful exporter with offices in 14 countries.

His first and foremost business principle is that you should treat everyone as you would like to be treated. Other principles include that culture should be a priority, everyone should have the opportunity to grow and develop and all staff should share in the profits of the business.

Hugh first started sharing the profits of the business with his workforce when he gave the Estate Wire team 10% of the sale proceeds when the business was sold (to fund the development of the Gripple wire connector). The rest of Gripple’s principles were developed bottom up – “from our staff saying this is what we believe in.”

Humour is a big part of the business: “If you don’t have humour, business can be very, very dry.”

Gripple is an innovator. It has a target that 25% of sales should arise from products not available 5 years ago. It has invested heavily in its development engineering team, but the sales team, continually seeking to identify customer problems that the business can address, is the leading edge of its innovation effort.

Since 2004 it has been mandatory for new employees to buy shares in Gripple. In 2011 Hugh set up a company limited by guarantee Glide (Growth Led Innovation Driven Employee) and he and his vice chairman are in the process of gifting their personal shares to Glide (50%) and to a charitable foundation (50%) so that by 2021 the group will be owned entirely by future generations of employees. The gifting is crucial, because it avoids burdening the business with debt, which is the consequence of many trust type employee ownership structures.

Glide also provides an effective vehicle whereby senior management can be challenged by staff on the running of the business.

The value of shares bought by an employee in 1994 has since increased by a factor of 200.

Gripple’s challenge to business orthodoxy doesn’t stop with employee ownership; it famously has no buying department, no HR department (people and culture instead), no job descriptions, no R&D department (ideas and innovation instead) and Glide is structured so that it can never be run by an accountant. Hugh maintains that there is no need for a buying department when you trust your people. Equally, recruitment decisions should be made by the manager for whom the recruit is going to work. “Job descriptions … stop people doing things.”

The first thing Hugh did when he founded the business was to surround himself with highly capable people. The original board comprised of Roger Hall (now vice chairman), John McGee (formerly MD of Presto Tools), and John Heselgrave, an expert in recruitment and training.

Along the way, other businesses have joined Glide and have benefited from Hugh’s investment approach: PMS Diecasting, supplier of the housings for the Gripple Connector, GoTools, and Laser Scanning. “So many businesses look at the bottom line, and not the top line and the investment.”

Hugh doesn’t talk about any achievements of the business as his personally, but believes the greatest collective achievement of Gripple is the Gripple spirit; the willingness of people to work together, to support each other and also their charitable efforts.

After “making a bog of” his O and A level results, Hugh went to Sheffield Technical College, where he sat an Institute of Marketing course, and took a job at Tinsley Wire