A BUILDING services firm from Tameside may be celebrating the past as it reaches a significant milestone but it is looking to the future after a management buy-out.
Copeland Group was started by the late Tony Copeland and his wife Annice in a house in Stamford Street in Ashton-under-Lyne as a small electrical contracting company.
Fifty years later, it has become one of the UK’s most foremost providers of mechanical and electrical building services and now has a team of around 100 people.
The company has worked on projects at schools, libraries, hospitals, listed buildings, retail establishments and numerous banks through a vast range of clients.
Copeland Group has undergone a restructuring following the death of founder Tony in September last year, with Mark Middleton as Managing Director, Aaron Brierley as Commercial Director and Tony’s daughter Alex Copeland-Anthony, who is Financial Director. They are working alongside Tony’s widow Annice, who remains a director and shareholder.
Alex says they want to continue to build on the success of the business and do her father proud.
“I think we’re already working together brilliantly,” she explained. “Dad always put an emphasis on looking after the employees, he would have sleepless nights over wanting to keep everyone employed and for the business to do well, because there were so many people depending on it.
“He established ways of working that were the reserve of huge corporate structures because that’s what he had learned through his early career; he brought that with him and used it as a template for how he wanted to run his business.
“We’ve still got those systems in place today to a large degree, which does improve the quality of what you’re doing because you’re doing it systematically.”
The firm began rewiring houses for Tameside and Salford councils before landing a contract to work on the X-ray department at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, where its teams completed various projects almost continuously for more than 20 years.
As the business grew, it meant a move to larger premises and the establishment of the group’s current headquarters at Nile Street in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1984.
MD Mark Middleton, who started with the group as an apprentice electrician in 1986, said: “Tony was very accomplished – an exceptional electrical engineer; he knew almost everything, and it was him who set the standard for quality.
“You can also attribute our success to a vast array of other things – in addition to the established team of loyal staff, we’ve got a great apprenticeship scheme with most of the apprentices staying on when they’re out of their time.”
The group aims to offer four to six apprenticeships to school leavers aged up to 18 each year and so far approximately 160 trainees have gone through the scheme.
Apprentices combine work with Oldham College and, when they emerge as a qualified electrician, they generally go on to a full-time job and are encouraged to progress within the business.
Mark added: “We’re very proud of the apprenticeship scheme. I came through it, as did our Commercial Director Aaron, and Paul Ogden, one of our Contracts Managers. It gives people a great opportunity to enter a key industry.”