The Heat is on

BOILER MAKER WITH GREEN VISIONA love for tinkering with model trains set Stephen Grant on track to start a business that could help households save over a tonne of CO2 every year, reports Ciarán Hancock

Making energy-efficient home heating boilers might not seem a hot-bed for innovation - or the sexiest of occupations - but for Offaly-based businessman Stephen Grant it has turned into a lucrative and fulfilling career, particularly at a time when the green agenda is gaining in importance globally.

Largely self-taught, Grant said the seeds of his success were sown in early childhood when he loved nothing more that making his own radios and model steam trains.

"They were quite simple, there was nothing sophisticated about them," the Offaly native recalls. "I just loved working with my hands and was always interested in how machines worked."

It was a skill he picked up from his father, a farmer who had a knack for fixing machinery.

Today, Grant Engineering, a company he founded in 1967, has a turnover of more than €65 million, is the biggest supplier of energy-efficient home-heating boilers in the UK and, with 200 staff, is one of the biggest employers in his home town of Birr.

Not that it has come easy to Grant. The journey to where he is today has been long and far from glamorous.

His family owned a 90-acre farm near Birr but Grant had no interest in working the land. Instead, he wanted, literally, to get his hands dirty. "I'd no interest in farming, it was always engineering and mechanics for me," he says.

He got his first job as a motor mechanic with a local garage. From there he moved to Éireann Peats where he became a maintenance manager within 12 months. In 1973, he set up his own heating and plumbing company. "It was a one-man operation installing oil heating systems into homes," he recalls. Business went well until the first oil crisis hit and the bottom fell out of his market.

"I started then to look at solid fuel heating systems. I found the back boiler systems being used at the time to be pretty poor, they weren't up to the job."

That's when Grant began tinkering with designs of his own. In 1976 he designed a twin-flue high-output backboiler capable of heating seven to eight radiators.

It sounds rudimentary by today's standards but it was a real breakthrough for shivering householders in 1970s Ireland.

Grant Engineering was set up in 1977 and three years later, the Offaly man developed a triple-pass back boiler that was tested by the Coal Board in England and was found to be 81 per cent efficient. "That was completely unheard of at the time," he says. "Most systems would only have been 55 or 60 per cent efficient."

That gave him his first breakthrough in the UK market.

Helped by an IDA grant and a loan from AIB, Grant's fledgling engineering operation had modest beginnings. "We used to manufacture the systems at night and install them the following day."

In 1979 he moved to a larger premises and slowly but surely his boilers were gaining traction with the merchant trade, a vital sales window for the company.

In 1980, the company had grown to a size where Grant recognised he could no longer run the business by himself.

John Fay was recruited as a general manager and later became a shareholder in the business.

"We grew rapidly on the back of the popularity of the solid-fuel burners and in 1981 we constructed a big purpose-built factory in Crinkle [ in Birr]."

In 1984, he began making oil-fuelled boilers for the Irish market and before the decade was out he had embarked on his most ambitious project to date.

"In the late 1980s I realised there was a new EU standard for oil boilers some time before the mid- to late-1990s so I decided to develop products to meet that requirement," he explains.

"I didn't just want to meet the requirement, I wanted to exceed it."

His new range of oil boilers proved popular both in Ireland and the UK and at the turn of this decade he designed and began manufacturing a range of condensing boilers.

Condensing boilers are 25-30 per cent more efficient than the traditional cast-iron oil boilers and are now a mandatory requirement in UK homes.

Grant's models, meanwhile, are widely regarded as being among the most efficient on the market.

Grant says his company has 50 per cent of the market in the UK, which is mostly replacements in existing homes.

In Ireland, the company has a one-third share of a market dominated by new builds.

Condensing boilers are not yet mandatory in Ireland, something that Grant is critical of.

"It should have been implemented at the same time as in the UK," he says.

"From an environmental point of view it should happen. Each household could save up to a tonne of CO2 a year at a time when households are producing five to seven tonnes of CO2 a year."

He has also been critical in the past of Irish housebuilders simply choosing the cheapest makes of boiler rather than the most efficient although he says that trend is changing as the market has slowed down.

"There's a lot more condensing boilers going into development sites now as builders see it as a way of making their properties more saleable."

At 62, many successful entrepreneurs would have one eye on retirement - but not Grant.

"I've no plans to retire, not as long as I'm able to keep working," he says. "I love work and couldn't visualise being retired."

Nor has he any plans to cash in his chips by selling to a rival. "I've had a couple of enquiries in the past but I'm not interested in selling the company."

After 30 years in business and with an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year nomination under his belt, Grant is well placed to advise budding entrepreneurs on starting out in business.

"The big thing is to realise your strengths and weaknesses," he says. "If they have a good idea, they should check it out thoroughly.

"They've got to make sure that it hasn't been done before and that their idea is marketable.

"A lot of good ideas don't make any money."