Growth is a SURE thing for North West refrigeration specialists

SURE Solutions, the Birkenhead-headquartered industrial refrigeration specialist, ranked 31st in this year’s list. Here, we speak to Operations Director Craig Shaw, alongside Ward Hadaway’s Rachel Clarkson, about how the business is backing its own ambitious growth plans.

A succession of heatwaves across the UK has brought cooling systems of all kinds to the forefront of many minds, but for SURE Solutions, refrigeration has been their business for a decade now.

The company designs, installs and maintains industrial refrigeration systems for customers in sectors including food manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and leisure. It is specialist work, often delivered in environments where reliability, compliance and speed of response are essential.

“We’re a three-generation family business,” says Craig. “The family element is important because it influences our decisions and how we look after people, but the business has also had to become more structured as it has grown.

“We have gone from something that started at the kitchen table to a national operation, so the challenge now is making sure we keep the same standards and culture while putting the right people, systems and processes around the business.”

Major projects have been the main driver of growth, with SURE commissioning industrial refrigeration systems for clients across the UK. Its latest major contract includes a £10m order that will run for around 12 to 14 months, while the service and maintenance division has also been developed to give the business more balance and support customers beyond installation.

That approach has helped SURE increase turnover from around £19m to more than £25m in a year. But Craig is clear that growth has brought its challenges.

“The main focus is keeping up with delivery,” he says. “There are no two ways about it – growth brings pressure. We look to partner with clients that feel like a good fit for the business and we don’t go after absolutely every opportunity. We look at the prospects where we think we can do an excellent job or that match our capabilities.”

For SURE, keeping up with demand has meant strengthening the business internally. Craig says the company has moved from ‘a stack of paper on a desk’ to engineers using tablets, with more information and data flowing through the business to support faster decisions. Although industrial refrigeration is a traditional, highly technical sector, SURE has employed a data analyst for almost three years and is using data and AI to improve how the company manages risk, contracts and day-to-day operations.

“We’ve got a lot of AI capability now,” says Craig. “A recent contract review cost us £30,000, but we have built a system that we think can reduce that to around £5,000. It can take hundreds of pages of a detailed framework and tell us what the key risks are and where we need to focus.

“The infrastructure we are building should also help us see where the biggest risks are in the business, where a deadline might be coming up, where there could be a cashflow issue or where a decision needs to be made. The idea is to make the business more proactive, rather than waiting for an issue to hit us.”

Industrial refrigeration engineers are highly skilled and difficult to find. Rather than wait for the labour market to change, SURE has spent the past eight years building its own pipeline of talent. Its apprenticeship programme includes engineering and business operations pathways and the company also recruits people with hands-on experience from other trades and retrains them for industrial refrigeration.

“We’ve only had one person who didn’t make it all the way through the qualification out of around 27,” says Craig. “22 are still with us. A lot of people complain that wages are increasing and everybody wants the best people, but they’re not recruiting apprentices. My view is that you should plan to train and retain. Help people with career progression and development, treat them well and then they will want to stay.”

That approach has created progression across the business, with apprentices moving into areas including project management, sustainability, finance and operations, and engineers progressing into senior management roles.

Rachel Clarkson, a director in the corporate team at Ward Hadaway, said: “SURE Solutions is a fantastic example of a North West business that is growing by investing in the things that will matter over the long term.

“It operates in a highly specialist market, but its story will be familiar to many ambitious businesses. Growth depends on winning the right work, keeping hold of good people, putting proper systems in place and being prepared to change how the business operates as it becomes larger and more complex. Its place in this year’s Fastest 50 is very well deserved.”

Looking ahead, SURE plans to keep growing, but Craig says the focus is on doing so in a managed way. The business wants to strengthen its project management team and grow the service division from two offices and three regional teams to five offices and five regional teams.

“A lot of this is not necessarily about pushing forward all the time,” Craig adds. “Sometimes it is about planning ahead to avoid mistakes and putting yourself in the best position to be ready when the right opportunity presents itself.”