By HELEN COMPSON helen.compson@hexham-courant.co.uk

Published at 13:11, Thursday, 04 December 2008

HE WAS just 14 when he launched his first business, selling explosive sodium pellets to his classmates.

His headmaster, alerted by alarmed parents, put a swift end to that venture.

He left school at 15, with three O-levels, to work in an agricultural nursery, but became frustrated at the lack of enthusiasm and drive among his fellow workers.

Years later, by then the driving force behind a multi-million pound international business, he was sacked from what was a family business by the son and heir.

In his own words, he was “betrayed, crushed and 51”. He was also unemployed.

The Christmas card he sent out that year featured a cartoon of himself dressed as Santa Claus, with the words ‘Got the sack’.

He remained unfazed by the threats of legal action made by his former company.

Today, aged 63, he is a millionaire at least three times over after pulling off a 10-year business development plan he drew up in his bedroom in the weeks and months after he was sacked.

Dr Tony Trapp – engineering genius, financial wizard, Newcastle University’s current David Goldman Visiting Professor of Business Innovation, and the anointed North-East Business Executive of 2008 – has always thought outside the box.

Since his earliest days, he has been unable to think anything other than big.

“I have always wanted to play a leading part in every situation that I have been in,” he said.

Even the machines and equipment built by his company, The Engineering Business (EB), based in Riding Mill, are huge.

Just one of its many firsts is the 110-tonne kit now used the world over for rescuing crews trapped in submarines.

Commissioned by NATO, the prestigious contract arose out of the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, when 118 Russian seamen perished at the bottom of the Barents Sea.

EB’s rig, which can be flown out in a series of packing cases and assembled within 18 hours, is capable of launching and recovering a submarine rescue vehicle from a support ship.

Ever versatile, the Engineering Business is resilient even in today’s economic market because it has kept its options open.

Working on the philosophy that a four legged chair won’t fall over, it works across not one but four different markets.

The fact that it designs and builds equipment for the offshore oil and gas, submarine telecoms, defence, and offshore renewables industries, means it always has a port to head for in a storm.

While most of its current contracts are in the oil and gas industry – EB’s order book currently stands at £65 million – it was able to respond to the revitalised submarine telecoms and offshore renewables industries when the call came.

Earlier this year it dusted down one of its leviathans, the Sea Stallion plough, to service a number of contracts to install telecom cables in the seabed.

“Our Sea Stallion plough range was launched some 10 years ago and set new standards of submarine telecom cable protection in the then buoyant and booming submarine telecoms market,” said Dr Trapp.

“We are delighted to see this superb workhorse back in demand.”

Dr Trapp’s ABC business philosophy – ambition, belief and courage – underpins the company and the activities of its 160 members of staff.

He and his three fellow founding directors-cum-owners, Tim Grinstead, Steve Agar and Mike Watchorn, brought diversity of character and experience to the company.

The ground rules they set were uncompromising: no majority shareholder (“no dictators here!”); behave at the outset like a larger company (board meetings, strategy development, non-executive directors); the four owners must get on; and all staff to share ownership and profits.

That last clause paid out dividends by the bucketload to staff in March when the company was sold to Dutch ship builders IHC Merwede for £30 million.

While Dr Trapp and trio surpassed their 10-year plan to make at least a million pounds each after tax, 70 members of staff shared 20 per cent, or £6 million, of the proceeds.

“We could not have achieved what we have done without their input,” he said.

“We might have got a few million more to divide between the four of us, but so what?

“What would you do with it when you’ve already got more than you need?

“It didn’t hurt at all, giving it away.”

IHC Merwede was quick to show its appreciation of its new colleagues, too.

It flew the 150 EB staff of the time by private charter to Rotterdam, where Merwede’s top brass spent the day showing them round its shipyards and rolling out generous hospitality.

The buy-out was a match made in heaven.

Merwede builds ships and EB equips them with the latest heavy engineering technology.

Merwede has bought the fastest growing and probably the most exciting company in the North-East of England.

And EB, which now trades as IHC The Engineering Business, has released the investment it needs to underwrite its latest contracts to the tune of £6 million in bonds.

With the finance sorted, the company is now tackling pressures of a different sort.

In a little over a decade it has grown to employ 170 members of staff and it is looking to recruit many more in the years to come.

Where to put them, is the question, because its head office in Broomhaugh House, Riding Mill, is bursting at the seams.

Last week the company announced it had submitted a planning application to extend its relatively small, existing base in nearby Stocksfield Hall.

A new 14,000 sq. ft two-storey extension would allow it to house not only all its current staff under one roof, but provide room for up to another 350 more during the next five years.

Dr Trapp said: “It’s important that we have a larger design office that enables us to continue to grow and offer world class opportunities here in Tynedale.

“These plans will make the further growth of the team and the business easier.”

Graduate engineers between the ages of 22 and 29 now make up almost a third of the workforce, so great emphasis is placed on training, both in-house and externally.

One thing the ‘old guard’ are determined to avoid, however, is crushing inspiration and enthusiasm under a weight of accepted thinking.

Dr Trapp is all too aware of just how suffocating academia can be.

A lecturer himself for five years at Edinburgh University – to which he now looks for high calibre engineering recruits – he left what could easily have been a sinecure for life.

“But I stood in the common room and looked round at middle aged lecturers having nervous breakdowns and older lecturers just serving their time,” he said.

“I had long holidays, an inflation-proofed pension and I could do what I liked, but I was becoming institutionalised. It just didn’t appeal.”

He never tires of the thrill of big business, though. And the fact there have been a few wrong turns over the years has only added a pinch of spice.

In the early years of fibre-optic communications systems, EB laid the first cable across the Atlantic seabed, in conjunction with British Telecom, using one of the Sea Stallions built on the Tyne.

By 2001 EB had a turnover of £8 million, almost entirely in the submarine telecom market. However, following the dot.com crash and the subsequent collapse of the submarine telecom market, its turnover halved and EB lost £1 million from one customer alone who went into receivership.

Thanks to EB’s versatility and flexibility, though, it soon landed two contracts in the oil and gas industry, supplying pipeline trenching ploughs to north American customers.

With just a touch of glee, Dr Trapp points out that EB was sold to Merwede just months ahead of the worst economic downturn in a generation.

But as managing director of IHC The Engineering Business, its fortunes are still his concern.

Undeterred by the fact he doesn’t know where the company’s next orders will come from, he is sure he will be able to pull another rabbit out of the hat.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk