recently celebrated its colourful 25 years history. Current MD Andy Beal takes up the story.
“GIC was founded by Stuart Wordsworth and Jeff Adams, who incidentally still works for us as our Senior Service Engineer. The business originally offered electrical contracting to various industries such as the then new power stations in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. With the majority of the workforce being Roses trained, it wasn’t long before these strong ties resulted in GIC building all the electrical panels for Rose Forgrove in Leeds. At this point GIC were employing over 25 electrical engineers. In the 1990’s GIC developed its own range of machinery including a vertical bag maker and a linear weigher. It was the simple but effective design of the vertical bag maker that started to sell and it was at this point I was brought in in 1999 to manage the sales & marketing of the GIC range. Gradually the emphasis of the business swung towards VFFS machines rather than panel building work and this shift was crystallised by the demise of Rose Forgrove who went into administration in 2001, leaving GIC with a large and painful bad debt. Since that dark day, the Company has hardly looked back and we now boast a U.K. operating machine base approaching 400, as well as a great reputation for after-sales support. In 2006 alongside my business partner Luke Murphy, we purcahsed GIC in a Management Buy Out. Since then GIC have enjoyed two very successful years allowing us to move in 2008 to a brand new purpose built factory and offices”.
As for the future Beal explains “Not much about our philosophy will change, we don’t let people down, we offer a fantastic machine range which stands along-side the best, and we pride ourselves on offering the best service in the industry. We want to grow a little but not to the point where we take our eye off the ball and become complacent”
