Forrester Adam, managing director of Fife-based timber handrail and glazing beads specialist, Haldane UK, has bought the business.
He told TTJ this week that the deal, concluded for an undisclosed sum, ‘secures the future of the business and of its employees’.
Already a 25% stakeholder in the business, Mr Adam, 37, raised external finance to buy the remaining 75% share owned by the estate of former Haldane UK managing director Kenneth Patullo, who died early last year.
Mr Adam joined the com-pany as a salesman in 1991 and had spells as a contracts manager and general manager before being appointed a director in 1995 and then managing director last year.
According to a company statement, new appointments will be made to the board ‘as the company looks to continue to inject new ideas and fresh approaches to its customers and its industry’.
Haldane was originally a ‘traditional woodturning company’ which made spinning wheels and bed parts. The move into architectural joinery has transformed the business and it now sells and installs its products throughout the UK and abroad. It has undertaken work at Windsor Castle, Disneyland Europe, the British Embassy in Moscow, Leith Ocean Terminal, St Andrews Bay and Hampden Park.
In the past eight years the workforce has increased from 15 to 40 and, in the past five, turnover has more than doubled to around £2.5m.
Following heavy investment and reconfiguration of the Glenrothes factory, Mr Adam said there is the prospect of a further 25% growth.
‘Our investment programme in technology, training, efficiency and marketing is one which was considered unnecessary and almost extravagant in our industry. It is now one that all our competitors envy.’
Last year Haldane UK was named Scotland’s Turnaround Business of the Year and Fife’s Small Business of the Year.
