3 minute read
Tough Work Ethic Achieves Success
An interview with Gallagher Group chairman and founder Pat Gallagher “This is our office, Leitrim House, and back in Leitrim, I have a holiday home called Kent House!” says Gallagher Group chairman and founder Pat Gallagher, as we chat in his office in Aylesford, near Maidstone in Kent.
Having started out with a £2,000 digger and a first year’s turnover of £36,000 in 1971, he has steadily grown the property, civil engineering, construction and aggregates business to one with over 300 employees - including three of his children (a fourth, one of his daughters, teaches business studies, so business seems to be in the genes) - and a turnover of over £70m.
Advertisement
Indeed, construction may be in the wider genes as well. BITA patrons Ray and Des O’Rourke - the owners of engineering and construction firm Laing O’Rourke - are cousins of Gallagher. “They’re a pair of geniuses,” he affirms with a laugh. “I’m very ambitious for our business, although unlike the O’Rourkes, I’m more comfortable not having to get on a plane to look at our projects.”
Firmly rooted in the local community, the company sponsors local football club Maidstone United, and built its stadium. Gallagher, 70, has grown fond of this corner of south-east England in the 53 years since he moved here with his parents when he was 17.
“Kent is a beautiful county, and its people have been very supportive of our success. I realise now that I and the Gallagher Group business might not have done as well in London as I have done here. It’s quite rural, with a lot of fruit and hop growing. In some ways it’s almost a home from home, as compared with rural Leitrim. The longer I live here, the more I grow to love it. I also worry about the disruption that might be caused to this area by Brexit.
“We’ve stayed away from work in London, but we work in Kent, Sussex and Hertfordshire, and actually as far north as Leicester - where the firm is building Leicester City FC’s training camp, working with McLaren Construction.”
The locality is dotted with offices and other commercial buildings that Gallagher’s business has built for blue-chip names including Scania, Marks & Spencer, Aldi and Next, as well as a number of local authorities.
As Gallagher gives me a tour of the area, we stop briefly at one of the Scania service centres, where new trucks and coaches are parked up and waiting to be checked over. Two of the trucks are for the Gallagher Group, then on the way to a Marks & Spencer development that’s under way, we pass one of the company’s cement mixers.
As we survey the large Marks & Spencer site, it’s evident that the Leitrim man has an eye for detail, and is a perfectionist. We move on to one of the firm’s two quarries, where material from development sites is brought to be sorted or recycled, while the Kent lagstone that’s unique to the site is used in many buildings that the company has constructed. Giant 85-tonne dump trucks are busy at work. Each of them costs about £500,000, Gallagher points out.
Does he have any secrets of management to share that he might have learned as he’s grown the business? “There’s really no comparison to learning the hard way. You treat people as you’d like to be treated yourself. With good people around you, do the job right and make money. Pay your bills on time as well. What we do can be a tough business, but if you’re tough with it, you can achieve success.”
His own career began as soon as he “could see over the counter,” helping out in the shop his parents had back in Knockacullion in Ireland. Harking back to the village, he has a replica Irish road sign beside his house, along with outbuildings and land where he keeps and breeds prizewinning cattle and racehorses. An avid racegoer and breeder, one of the horses is called Knockacullion, with another named Ragstone Cowboy, in honour of the stone from his quarry.
“I loved groundwork and civil engineering as soon as I got started. The synergies with the quarry and aggregates, and then property, came later. But wherever I could earn a Pound, I would do whatever work was available, whatever the size of the project. There was no work-life balance. We’d work as many hours as we could all week - I was always wanting to get more and more work done in a day.
“Back then, I was also fortunate to find loyal and hard-working people here in Kent, and many of them stayed with me. The business wouldn’t be where it is today without them. It was thanks to them that we kept winning more and more work, and that remains true today,” he adds, reeling off a long list of names.
Construction director Ken Baillie, who has been with the firm for 36 years adds that Gallagher has a strategic mind. “He’s always looking ahead. This is a family business, and Pat has installed the importance of caring for all our staff.”
Gallagher received the BITA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 and he pays tribute to the work of the organisation, its board, staff and founder Paul Whitnell.
“Paul has a way of opening the doors for smaller companies and larger ones on both sides of the Irish Sea. We’re buying a lot of pre-cast concrete products from Ireland, for example, thanks to his efforts. The organisation gave a big boost to the profile of the Gallagher Group.
“Paul is committed wholeheartedly to BITA and its ethos about people who know people helping each other. He shares my view that there’s no better way of building up relations between Britain and Ireland than through business, and that can be very powerful on many levels.”
John Reynolds
