Secret to TG Eakin's £40m family business: 'just do the right thing'

BELFAST BRIEFING:The business employs over 200 and despite a deepening recession continues to prosper

WHAT DOES it take to build a family business from scratch to one that employs more than 200 across two sites in the North and Wales and enjoys an annual turnover of £40 million plus?

“Naivety”.

That is what is required according to Tom Eakin, who says successful business people need to possess a certain degree of naivety to just go with their instincts, not think about failure and “ignore everything else and just do what needs to be done”.

Eakin has practised what he preaches in the 51 years since he set up his first pharmacy in east Belfast. But if life had turned out as planned, he should never have been the chairman of TG Eakin, one of the North’s award-winning family businesses.

He had originally emigrated to Canada with his wife in the early 1960s but chose to return, opening his first pharmacy in Dundonald.

As a pharmacist, Eakin found himself becoming increasingly frustrated with the manufactured quality of certain products. In particular he had a close family member with a urostomy (an opening in the stomach that is made during surgery and fitted with a device to collect urine) and often found that some of the products used to help ostomates were faulty.

Driven by a strong desire to help family and patients who had spoken of their problems with leakages and sore skin, he decided he could do better himself.

“I was very angry about it, I thought why should they have to put up with this and, if I couldn’t make something better, then I shouldn’t be here doing what I am doing,” Eakin said.

So he set about making an adhesive to attach pouches to the skin with a small mixer that was normally used in bakeries that he had modified himself. Hours invested in trial and error produced an adhesive that was soon in demand and which became a forerunner for what is today the Eakin Cohesive Seal.

“We didn’t have the internet back in those days so there was a lot of time spent in libraries, looking up reference books and working for hours on end just to feel your way through it.

“I had to work really hard, I felt like a dunce sometimes. But I was always prepared to ask for help from great people who knew more than I did,” Eakin said.

Once he had formulated his successful adhesive he started working on creating other products.

“It just seemed natural to carry on. I had gone into pharmacy because I loved making things. The business is totally different today from what it was when I first started because everything is made for pharmacists today but back then we made all our own medicinal products. There was for example very little penicillin – it was all MIBS, 693s and 746s.

“I never thought about setting up a business, it just happened. It was a necessary evil in a way because if you don’t have a business and you aren’t making a profit, then you aren’t going survive doing what you are doing. There is always a bottom line,” Eakin said.

He was constantly driven by a desire to make sure his products were better than anything else on the market – an ethic that still defines TG Eakin.

“It seems automatic to me that you should try to be better. After all, what we do is really about helping to improve someone’s quality of life – that’s still what drives our business. It is why we have a very strong research and development team at the heart of our business.”

That commitment to the person who will ultimately use his products is one of the reasons why TG Eakin’s total sales have increased by 550 per cent over the past decade.

The manufacturing side of the business may have started life as a four-person concern in a house next door to the original pharmacy. But today it operates from a state of the art factory outside Belfast and another in Cardiff.

Its Belfast headquarters has been earmarked for a £6 million investment that will result in the addition of five additional production lines. The business is also likely to recruit 25 additional staff.

Eakin is proud that the family-owned company’s products are all manufactured in the UK and are exported to more than 30 countries worldwide.

He does not believe in taking time out to look back at what he has achieved. But others have. Eakin was recently named by the Institute of Directors as the UK’s Family Business Director of the Year. But he brushes this off; his success, he says, is partly based on the fact that he is still telling the people he works with today the same thing he did nearly 50 years ago.

“Don’t make decisions. Just do the right thing and get the right answers.”