Interview with Andrew Esson of Quick Hydraulics

IT was an idea that had been bubbling away in Andrew Esson’s head for a while. The ContiTech Beattie managing director had done his research, weighed up his options and sought the advice of friends and contacts.

Among those was leading South Tyneside businessman Geoff Ford, chairman of Ford Aerospace. Ford told him he was “confident this will be the best decision you’ve ever made”.

Less than a year after being named as Tyneside and Northumberland’s Business Executive of the Year for his work at the specialist Ashington engineering firm, he sat behind his desk for the first time as the majority shareholder and managing director of Quick Hydraulics, a former family firm located in North Shields.

Esson says: “I’m aware it will be different now, as I’m going from a £30m turnover business to a £3m business. But I’m going into it with my eyes open.”

Late last week, the rubber stamp was put on the deal which puts Esson in control of the New York company, which supplies hydraulic products to customers across the UK and abroad. Originally set up by Ron Quick in 1977 as a distributor of hydraulic components, it expanded its work to include service and project skills after it was passed to Ron’s son Peter in 1995. It is now a noted UK fluid power centre in the UK, and Esson says it was that specialist engineering nous that partly attracted him to the business.

As the head of ContiTech Beattie, Esson supervised an operation which employed 97 people, including 82 in Ashington, 14 in Aberdeen and one in Singapore. While the company was part of one of the world’s biggest tyre manufacturers, the bosses at parent company Continental AG largely left him alone to run the ship.

Last year, the carbon steel hydraulic hose manufacturer reported its exports had more than doubled to £23m in the last three years, and anticipated its turnover leaping from £28m to £60m by 2016. It was this sort of growth that gave Esson a trophy for his mantelpiece, courtesy of The Journal and Evening Gazette’s North East Business Executive of the Year awards.

“After I won the award, it felt like it was a perfect time to step out,” he says. “It was a fantastic 2010 for both me and ContiTech, which had won its third straight Manufacturing Excellence award as well as a Queen’s Award for Enterprise. I decided my objective for 2011 was to move to the next stage of my career.”

But what was it that made him consider a shift at all, after 27 years working in the major corporate sector?

He says: “From the beginning of last year, I recognised my career development prospects with Continental were going to be limited by the fact I wasn’t internationally mobile. I moved to the North East in 2002 and established myself here.

“It’s an area I love and I’d love to see my career out here. The only way I could really do that within Continental was to continue doing what I was doing with ContiTech Beattie, and if I wanted to develop beyond that I’d have to go abroad. That’s when I decided it might be a good time to go out there and work for myself.”

Esson began putting out feelers in the business community, and his contacts unearthed a few firms that could be suitable for him. One was Quick Hydraulics, a 14-person company which ticked all the boxes.

He says: “It was a specialist engineering business, and a profitable cash-generating company that could benefit from some of the things I’d learned as part of a large company.

“Although ContiTech had never worked with Quick, the company manufactured the type of product that we would use in our fluid handling systems. When we were doing due diligence, it became clear this was a well-run company that knew what it was doing.