summer 22 behind the boardroom Take a look behind our member’s boardrooms and discover what makes their businesses tick. In this issue, we chat with OGEL’s Gary Giles about his revolutionary recycled plastic building system…
What was the spark that inspired you to found OGEL? I can give you the exact date and time! It was Wednesday 4 February 2015, at 3.45pm. I’m a chartered accountant by trade and the company I was working for at the time had just bought a new machine that was for packaging renders and plasters into plastic bags. And my boss at the time said ‘if all else fails, we can always make reusable sandbags to stop floods’. And I thought, that’s a brilliant idea that! But then I thought, to make it water-tight, what you need is a wall to put them in. Which started a whole journey! Basically, once I figured out how to build a flood defence system with a straight wall, I figured out a way to put corners on it. Then when you put
corners on a wall you can create an enclosure. And when you put a roof and a floor in you’ve built a room haven’t you. The way I’d sort of describe it is, you can’t reinvent the wheel but you can reinvent the wall. And the brick, the normal house brick or similar, the principle behind that is 10,000 years old. They found the first brick, in modern day Iraq, in around 8000 BC. And the only difference between that and the modern house brick is that it’s smaller because people had smaller hands back in those days. Everything else was the same, and I thought, hang on - you can’t reinvent the wheel, but now you have carbon fibre wheels. So, the wheel has evolved over time. But the brick is exactly the same, it’s never changed. Until now!
How did you form your board after having that initial inspiration? The journey to build the boardroom is a relatively new one. With being an accountant I knew how businesses run, I knew the back office stuff. But I had absolutely zero knowledge of plastic, and no real knowledge of how to make this product that I had in my head. Our first real board member is Richard Parker (Development Director), who runs E3 Design in
Tyneside. We were put in touch by mutual contact. I told him the idea I had and how it worked, and commissioned his company to come up with some original ideas, and from that original set of ideas came the final process. So there was a lot of getting the ideas together on paper. From there, we needed to get the funding together – I went to various innovation forums and things like that, and one of the guys I met there was James Robson MBE, Chairman of the Entrepreneurs' Forum. I met James in a social capacity and told him the idea. Long story short, we kept in touch for four or five years and after more talks he agreed to come on board and be Chairman. He gives me and the rest of the team a sounding board which is really important, as he’s an extra pair of eyes who has an engineering and business background. He’s got a slightly better skill set than I do, but there’s lots of overlap and it really helps to have that person there. Who features in your boardroom currently? With our board we try to take all of our individual skills and pull them together so each person has a
The main advantage of going on Dragon's Den was always going to be the exposure which is huge.
