Constant Group: How To Grow A Family Manufacturer Without Losing Its Soul

Fifty six years after Harry Garlick was told he could not afford a fish and chip shop, his grandchildren run a precision sheet metal business supplying telecoms, pharma and food production. Joint managing director Emma Gilligan explains how Constant Group has scaled up without becoming somebody else.

In 1969, Harry Garlick was told he did not have enough money to buy a fish and chip shop, let alone an aluminium trading company. A year later he had one. Constant Aluminium Supplies Ltd opened on Greenhalgh Street, off Oldham Road, in June 1970, funded by savings his eldest son Richard had earmarked for a newsagent's kiosk in central Manchester.

Harry's wife Vera kept the books as company secretary. Deliveries went out by hand or on the bus until orders justified the firm's first truck, bought for £75.

The first set of accounts still hangs on the wall. It shows a profit of £4,434. Turnover today sits at £9.9 million, and the business runs from an 80,000 sq ft site at Meadowbank Business Park in Oldham, close to junction 22 of the M60. Its customer list takes in BT, Openreach, Network Rail, Transport for London, M&S Food and Boots.

The interesting question is not how Constant got bigger. Plenty of firms do that. It is how it got bigger while still feeling, to the people inside it, like a family business.

From Kick Plates To Telecoms Cabinets

The company began as an aluminium stockholder, buying and selling metal to local businesses. Richard, who describes his early role as labouring, or "goffering", soon spotted a way to add value to the material. Around a year in, he began turning leftover aluminium sheet into fingerplates and kick plates, and moved the firm into architectural ironmongery.

It became the largest manufacturer of kick plates in the UK, built on a 24 hour turnaround that few rivals could match. "It involved working all hours to make it happen," says Gilligan, "but that speed and willingness to respond to what customers needed really helped put the business at the forefront of the industry."

Richard's wife Maggie left a career in teaching to join him, initially as "the sales girl", taking calls at home in the evening and passing orders to Richard to make and deliver the next day. When Vera retired, Maggie became company secretary.

Over the decades the fabrication side outgrew the ironmongery. Constant is now a full service sheet metal business with design, engineering, manufacturing and assembly under one roof:

• Design: engineers working in SolidWorks, Creo and Radan

• Cutting and forming: a Bystronic fibre laser and a Trumpf punching machine, both automated, plus eight Bystronic press brakes

• Fabrication and finishing: 18 welding bays, automated powder coating lines, a stainless only bead blast line and wet spray and polyurea coating

• Assembly and logistics: isolated assembly areas for mechanical and electromechanical integration, and three 7.5 tonne wagons for national delivery

Today it specialises in telecoms cabinets and enclosures, food preparation units, medical and pharmaceutical cabinets, and industrial and infrastructure parts, and holds ISO 9001 certification.

The family has grown with it. Richard and Maggie's children, Matt Garlick and Emma Gilligan, bought the business from their parents on 10 April 2021, Richard's birthday, and now run it as joint managing directors. Matt's wife Jayne and Emma's husband David work in the business as business development manager and CTO, respectively.

The name later changed to Constant Group, which Gilligan says "better reflected the breadth of what the business had become and where we wanted to take it next."

Earning A Place, Not Inheriting One

Gilligan grew up in the business. She worked in it as a child for pocket money and watched her parents steer it through recessions, wars and political upheaval. "It's in my blood," she says.

"I genuinely don't know what it would be like not to have Constant Group in my life."

Yet joining was never assumed. Her parents pushed both children to go away, study and see life outside the firm. Matt asked to join on the afternoon he graduated from Manchester Metropolitan. For Emma, the moment came in the second year of a business and marketing degree at De Montfort. "I suddenly got the buzz for business and development," she recalls. "I phoned my dad and said, 'Good news, I want to come and work for the business.'"

Richard was pleased, but set terms. She would have to justify her own salary, create her own role and build a career on merit rather than being handed a job because of her surname. She had to forge her own path.

That condition did more than motivate her. It sent a signal to every non family employee that position in the business follows contribution. "That gave me a huge amount of drive to prove to everyone around me that I could do it," she says.

"Being a woman in what was, and still is in many ways, a male dominated industry gave me even more determination to be the best I could be and earn my place."

For family firms worried about culture, this is the first lesson. Entitlement in the next generation is often the earliest crack, and the wider team notices long before the family does.

Culture Does Not Scale By Accident

The usual story of a growing family firm is that the personal touch thins out as headcount rises. Somewhere past the point where the founder can walk the floor and greet everyone, the business becomes an organisation, and the people in it become a payroll.

Gilligan's answer is to refuse that trade. Constant employs 87 people and she knows every one of them by name. "I know about their families and I make a conscious effort to ask about more than just work: how they are, what's happening in their personal lives and how they're feeling," she says. "It's important that people know they are valued as individuals, not just as employees or numbers on a spreadsheet. Without the team, we are nothing."

That sense of belonging was never reserved for the Garlicks. The firm has a core of long serving staff who joined as young men, built careers there and went on to raise families of their own. "We're not only growing Constant Group to support our own family," Gilligan says.

"The business provides livelihoods and opportunities for lots of other families too."

The values she names are deliberately plain: teamwork, adaptability, trustworthiness and care, for the team and for customers. They have carried across three generations, and they shape a commercial habit as much as an internal one. "We've never wanted to simply manufacture something and make a profit," she says.

"We've always tried to give the customer that little bit more, whether that's extra service, care and attention, bringing ideas to the table or helping them find a better way of doing something."

In other words, the culture is not a perk bolted onto the business model. It is the business model.

Keeping Good People In A Tight Labour Market

UK manufacturers routinely cite skills shortages as one of their biggest constraints. Gilligan's view is that the hiring problem is partly a keeping problem. "Retaining good people is just as important as attracting new ones," she says.

Her approach rests on three things.

1 - Openness. "We want there to be no conversation that can't be had," she says. Owners and managers have to be people employees can trust, with respect flowing both ways. That covers problems at work and problems at home.

2 - Visibility. The family and senior managers are on the shop floor every day, hands on and involved in the manufacturing. "That creates a two way respect and shows that we all care about the products we make and the work that goes into them.

3 - Thinking about people's lives, not just their shifts. Constant runs a four day working week, structured to give staff a better balance between work and home, alongside an in house apprentice scheme that grows skills from within. "If you want people to feel valued, you have to show them that you're thinking about their lives as well as the needs of the business," Gilligan says. The aim, she adds, is to develop and grow together, accepting that people's circumstances change over a working life.

None of this is expensive in the way a new press brake is. But it requires leaders to spend their scarcest resource, time, on the floor rather than in the office.

Investing So As Not To Stand Still

Fifty six years of trading would be enough for some firms to rest on. Constant is spending instead. It has recently put £3 million into new machinery and a new building to improve the flow and capacity of its manufacturing, on top of earlier expansion into neighbouring units.

It has also picked up a North West collaboration award with CommScope, which Gilligan sees as proof of something the team has long known. "Constant Group isn't a small, traditional manufacturer sitting quietly in the background," she says.

"We're a technologically advanced manufacturing business based in Greater Manchester, working with major organisations and exporting products around the world."

The next goal is recognition. She wants Constant to be known for what it contributes to UK manufacturing, to Greater Manchester and the North West, and to Oldham, where the family's roots go back more than five decades.

That ambition has a recruitment edge. Gilligan wants young people to see that firms like hers still exist and still offer real careers. "There can sometimes be a perception that a long established family business is traditional or standing still, but that really isn't the case," she says. "Generational businesses have to evolve, expand and adapt."

It is the same balance the firm has struck since the first kick plate left Greenhalgh Street: change what you make and how you make it, and keep hold of how you treat people.

The Bottom Line

Constant Group's growth from a £75 truck to a £9.9 million precision manufacturer shows that culture can survive scale, but only if leaders treat it as work rather than heritage.

The next generation earned their roles, the owners stay visible on the shop floor, and the firm invests as hard in its people's lives as in its machinery. The products have changed completely since 1970. The way the business treats people has not.