Aycliffe Today Business Aycliffe Today Business Issue 31 | Page 19

The magazine for Aycliffe Business Park | 19
Formula Plastics employs 62 people on
its units at the IES Centre, the former
Underground Mining Machine (UMM) site
on Aycliffe Business Park.
Formula Plastics chairman Dr John Suggate with the
firm’s managing director James Goodliffe.
the right job for me, so I decided to invent
my own! I saw an advert in The Journal, from
the County Durham Training and Enterprise
Council, encouraging people to start-up their
own businesses.
“I got a few people together and sourced
some cash and launched the company in
May 1996.”
After working in polymer research and
lecturing at Lancaster University, Dr Suggate
spent 13 years with a Yorkshire-based
polyethylene company, which specialised in
producing film that went into packaging for
wines and soft drinks.
He went on to run the business for five
years, a spell which arguably helped to forge
a shrewd business acumen which would
put him in good future stead, before moving
North.
Later, Aycliffe Trading Estate – as it was
known back then – was his preferred choice
to start up his fledgling business.
“We’d initially set up to supply Thorn
Lighting, so we were looking for somewhere
fairly close by with good transport links, and
Aycliffe just ticked a lot of boxes for us,” says
Dr Suggate.
“We were doing a lot of work for Thorn
and other local companies, but then we had
to explore other markets and that’s when
we started looking at the automotive sector,
which is very much our core business today.
“In 2000 we started working with
Calsonic Kansai, then based in Shildon, who
were making air conditioning units for the
automotive industry. They gave us some
work on the Honda Civic, as a test really,
and they’ve been one of our main customers
since 2002.
“They relocated their Shildon operation to
its other site in Washington and very quickly
started to expand, and so we started to grow
with them, and they’ve remained a major
customer of our business since.”
A large part of Formula’s recent success
is down to re-investment. The firm bought a
state-of-the-art ‘twin-shot’ machine in 2003
– which enables two different materials to
be injected into the moulding tool during the
production process.
A second has since followed to help
Formula meet demand, while they have
invested a further £650,000 in new
machinery in the last two years.
They’re helping Formula manufacture parts
for well-known Nissan models – including the
Qashqai, Juke and Leaf – as well as parts for
most UK manufactured cars, supplying many
tier 1 companies in the North East, the UK
and Europe.
Dr Suggate says cautiously: “It has
taken us 20 years to get to just under £4m,
which is a long time, but it has been gentle,
controlled growth.
“But the company is definitely in the best
shape it has ever been in. Our best year was
2016, based purely on profits, but we’ve re-
invested that by buying two new machines,
so our profitability has dipped in 2017
because we’ve invested in the future.
“What’s more pleasing is that we’ve
created jobs for the local area, and we have
a good retention rate of staff. Ten years ago
we had 30, now we have 62, and several of
those have been with us for 15 years, quite
a few more than 10, and that’s something
we’re very proud of.”
These days, Dr Suggate takes a back seat
in the running of the company – working
part-time mainly on the financial side of
the business – leaving the day-to-day stuff
to managing director James Goodliffe and
production director Geoff Hodgson.
Goodliffe, who joined the company nearly
three years ago, now wants Formula to
explore new markets while maintaining its
Formula Plastics make hundreds of
thousands of parts from its 44,000 sq ft
premises on Aycliffe Business Park.
firm footing within the automotive sector.
“We have the technology here now that
can make plastic parts for virtually any
industry,” says Goodliffe.
“We’ve invested £650,000 in new
machinery over the last two years so we now
need to capitalise on those investments and
maximise what we have.
“Our aim is to increase our sales by at
least £1m over the next 12-18 months while
increasing our workforce, and a big focus of
that will be on non-automotive sectors. In the
next two to three years, we plan to grow the
business to over £6m.
“There are always opportunities out there,
but the big question for us is how ambitious
could we be, or how ambitious do we
want to be, without jeopardising the future
longevity of the company?”
Formula Plastics specialises
in making parts for the
automotive industry,
producing products for most
UK manufactured cars.
Find out more about Formula Plastics and its specialist injection moulding services at www.formula-plastics.co.uk