Gerald Bloom Wins Family Business Lifetime Achievement Award

Family Business United is delighted to announce that Gerald Bloom, has received a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of a lifetime, quite literally, spent building British manufacturing businesses from nothing.

Gerald's story does not begin in plastics at all. He grew up the youngest of three brothers in a family built around Bloom's, a clothing company founded by his tailor grandfather, Loo Bloom. Gerald spent a year learning the trade at the high end clothing house Aquascutum in London, fully expecting to return to the family firm. But with his grandfather, his father and two older brothers already running the show, there was little room for a younger son's ideas. Gerald came to a conclusion that would define the rest of his working life: it was not a good idea for one family to all live off a single business. So he set out to build his own.

He placed an advert in the local paper and talked his way onto the factory floor of a plastics company, running night shifts and learning every machine and process the business had. It was also where he learned, from a boss with a memorably poor way of treating people, exactly how not to run a team. That experience, he says, is what pushed him to go it alone.

In 1961, with a small bank loan, Gerald converted a set of old horse stables off Birmingham's Broad Street into a factory of around 1,000 square feet, building much of his own equipment from scratch. He named the business Midland Industrial Plastics. What began with tinted Perspex sun visors and street lighting covers for local manufacturers grew, factory by factory, from Aston to Walsall to an 80,000 square foot site, and eventually to Stourport, as MIP became a major supplier to the trucking and then the automotive industry.

Along the way, Gerald talked his way into designing and prototyping an entire truck interior for Leyland when nobody else believed a Birmingham plastics man could do it. He pioneered new materials and processes in the UK, including a wood and polypropylene composite called Woodstock and an injected foam process for door casings, work that ultimately made MIP a trusted supplier to Land Rover and Range Rover, producing components for a thousand vehicles a week. He talked his way past a legendarily gruff purchasing director at British Leyland to win an order on the spot. He steered the company through the collapse of British Leyland as a client in 1975, through the recession that followed, and through the tightening demands of just in time manufacturing. And in between all of that, in 1965, he found time to win the RAC British Rally Driving Championship.

By 1998, MIP employed around a thousand people and turned over close to ninety million pounds. Recognising, in his own words, the importance of knowing your place and your capabilities in business, Gerald sold the company to the American industrial group Textron, seeing off more than one insincere buyer along the way with the lesson that a deal is only done when the money is in the bank.

Most people would have called that a career. Gerald called it a beginning. Alongside his long time colleague Peter Raby, who had joined him nearly thirty years earlier, he started again from a factory in Droitwich, deliberately choosing a name nobody would forget: Big Bear. More than 25 years on, Big Bear Plastic Products employs around 80 people and is now, fittingly, a family business in its own right, run by Gerald's daughter Emma Hockley, who has led it through, among other things, the pandemic.

What comes through every account of Gerald, from colleagues, customers and his own family, is not just the scale of what he built, but how he built it. He is described, without exception, as honourable, a man whose word is his bond. He is generous, having rescued his own brother's business, another automotive supplier from administration and turned it into a success. He is famously organised, never without the diary in which every promise, his own and everyone else's, is written down and kept. And he remains, even approaching his 90th year, restlessly ambitious for the business, still to be found on the shop floor most days, usually in a pristine suit and tie under his hi-vis.

Gerald has employed thousands of people across two businesses over more than sixty years, some of them for over thirty years apiece, and by every account you would struggle to find one of them with a bad word to say about him. He puts much of that down to a lesson he has tried to pass on throughout his career: that the quality of the result is equal to the quality of the instruction, and that clear, respectful communication will take you further in business, and in life, than almost anything else.

From a converted stable off Broad Street to two major British manufacturing businesses, from the rally stages of 1965 to the boardrooms of Land Rover and Leyland, Gerald Bloom has spent a lifetime building, employing, mentoring and, above all, doing right by the people around him and is totally deserving of recognition and a worthy recipient of this year's Lifetime Achievement Award.