Balance Leads to Dizzying Success
Published in Ontario Business Journal
(February, 1996)
For years, Tony Paget toiled away in the blow mould industry, watching from the inside as different companies soared, while others crashed. By 1991, he had tired of being a spectator, and decided to set out on his own, armed with a plan to create a new blow mould-manufacturing firm. Well, he didn’t exactly do it on his own. Instead, he brought with him three other industry veterans, Rob Fazackerley, Graeme Lambert, and Russell Norman, each with strengths in a number of different areas. Together, the team formed Stoney Creek based Garrtech Inc., determined that their collective experience would give them an edge in a highly competitive market, despite the lingering recession.
Time, it would seem, have proved Paget right. In just four years, Garrtech has grown by more than 800%, and has built a reputation in the plastics industry as a leading blow mould manufacturer. One of the reasons for the company’s success has been Paget’s commitment to a diversified client base and project spectrum that ranges from multi-cavity work for Arizona based igloo Products to ‘one-off’ products for local industrial firms.
“We have consistently maintained a balance of large and small projects that has managed to eliminate, to a large degree, the fluctuations throughout the year,” explains Paget. “We want to get and hold a good cross-section so that we’re doing the multi-cavity work as well as the industrial work.”
Garrtech has been able to accommodate such a diversity of request from clients largely because of the success with which it has implemented new technologies, such as CAD/CAM systems for its state of the art 3D software. The commitment to those technologies has been capital intensive, but the marketplace demands the performance that it can produce, according to Fazackerley, vice-president of sales and marketing.
“In the end, it costs you more not to buy the software and to keep it upgraded,” he insists. “At the same time, we have to keep our people up to date to ensure that we are getting the most performance out of every piece of equipment that we have.”
In addition to keeping its equipment up-to-date, Garrtech is now being forced to update its space, and has begun construction on a 5,000 square foot administration and engineering facility adjacent to its 15,000 square foot manufacturing plant.♦
Back to News
|
|
