Having studied psychology at Trinity and gone on to do a masters degree in addiction studies, Faye Healy had no intention of joining the family stainless-steel fabricating business. She loved the academic side of the subject, the reality was somewhat different.
“I wasn’t happy in addiction services, so when my father offered me a job here three years ago, I took it,” she said. She joined as sales and marketing director after undertaking a course in international selling to brush up her skills.
Tony Healy founded Spectac International, when he moved to Dundalk in 1986. His own father had worked in stainless steel, making dairy tanks in Munster. Tony settled in Dundalk, a town with a brewing tradition, home to the Harp and Macardles brands. Starting with just two fabricators and a receptionist, the business grew steadily, picking up customers in dairy, brewing, food and pharmaceuticals.
Faye spent most of her summers in the business. It grew significantly and staff numbers rose to more than 20 people. She saw how hard the recession hit too, shrinking employee numbers back to 12 by 2008, with tough times to follow.
Spectac’s saving grace was a strong customer base from a range of industries. “Even still, my father had to battle through, taking work very cheaply just to keep as many as he could in work, to the point where he didn’t make a profit on a project.”
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Things had just started to pick up when she joined the company in 2012. She had strong views about the direction to follow. “My concept was to change the company’s image completely and market it in a fresh new way, starting with a revamp of the logo and website,” she said.
The change was more than cosmetic. “My father had all this knowledge and background in this niche area of stainless steel,” she said. “I wanted to use that expertise to position Spectac as a professional engineering company that totally understood its clients’ needs.”
Using the website and social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter to promote the company’s expertise, she took a bold next step. “We needed a product,” she said.
The company had been commissioned to fabricate high performance stainless-steel tanks for various purposes, which it still does. Healy’s idea was to also take a step back and incorporate a design element. Investing in an in-house design team, she and her father set about providing complete systems for distilling, brewing and dairy.
Their timing was good. Fuelled by global demand for craft beer and artisan whiskey, the number of start-up enterprises in these sectors has grown rapidly.
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“Tony has great contacts in Germany, for example, which is famous for its beer, so he could see what was happening in the market over there, and he could also see there was no reason why we couldn’t begin to provide complete brewing systems at home ourselves,” she said. “We could also see the boom in the beer industry and thought, ‘Why not do something to tap into that growth?’ ”
Spectac began designing cost-efficient solutions for customers, some of which are push-button breweries. “People like to have a handmade element to craft beer so most customers opt for something semi-automated, but we can create fully automated, recipe-driven breweries that can run through the whole process from start to finish at the touch of a button, controlled via your iPhone.”
In the past three years, Spectac has supplied a number of the country’s newest beer brands with brewhouses. Ireland has seen a spate of whiskey distillery startups too. One of Spectac’s most high-profile jobs is Teeling’s distillery in Newmarket Square, Dublin.
Whiskey distillers need to have deep pockets, and not just because there is more kit involved.
“With brewing, the results are instantaneous. Make your beer and you’ve something to sell. With whiskey, you have to make it and then wait three to five years before you can start selling.”
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The pivot into turnkey solutions for breweries and distilleries has paid dividends, currently accounting for 50% of the company’s revenues.
The business has also begun exporting. “We’re doing a lot of work in the UK now, which has been a big focus for us. Over the past three years we’ve launched websites in French and German as well as a UK site, and the UK alone now accounts for 20% of turnover.”
The company has worked hard to grow clients in other sectors, too, particularly food and pharma. It has a number of quality standards under its belt, including ISO 9001.
Healy switched to buying directly from steel mills. “It cuts out the middleman and makes us a lot more competitive” she said. “I spent a lot of time going to trade shows trying to build relationships with mills.”
Earlier this year, the company moved into a 44,000 sq ft facility. Last month, it invested in Ireland’s only plasma welding machine, which will boost efficiency. The company also has a new 18 metre high-bay facility, enabling it to build giant tanks.
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“We needed to make such moves. We’d got to the stage where we were turning down work because we didn’t have capacity.”
Turnover last year was €4m, a company record. “But we’re already looking to double that this year.”