FROM THE INDUSTRY
It is rare in any industry to encounter a 100-year-old, fourth generation business that is not only surviving, but clearly thriving. Rarer still is the ability to peer around the curve and anticipate technological and commercial change such that a business is able to adapt and exploit a rapidly changing landscape. Even more unusual does the business remain sufficiently exciting that the fourth generation is clearly delighted to be a part of it. We talked to Jerry Mills, CEO of Mills Ltd, a longtime member of the SCTE about the journey the company has been on and where they are going in the future. Strap in. How did the company get started? My grandfather was a tool maker who set the business up in 1918. My father came in the business about 1947. The company was an engineering distributor of small tools and their hunting ground was West London; they would go to a lot of the old MOD auctions and buy a lot of old ex- government stock and resell it. What kinds of tools? We were supplying a lot of lathe and engineering tools, drills, taps, dyes, that sort of thing. When the war ended, British products were in great demand, the whole of British industry was a hive of activity. Park Royal was the largest manufacturing base south of Birmingham, it used to employ over a quarter of a million people. The company was about 20 strong then. It was very much the ‘guys in the brown coats’, like the Four Candles Two Ronnies sketch. They had everything from a screwdriver to a socket to a drill bit. It continued like that till I came in about 1977, at which point manufacturing was moving overseas to Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. British manufacturing just wasn’t competitive anymore. To make matters even worse, outside the old premises we had in Acton the council had put double yellow lines out the front of the shop, making parking very difficult. On top of that, B&Q and Homebase had just opened. By 1986 we were thinking, what the hell are we going to do?
What happened next?
We had a big pow wow about where this was all going to go, because clearly there was no future in being an engineering distributor. The option seemed that if you weren’t going to make it, then you’d probably need to service it. We realised we could build toolkits for the maintenance of things like coffee machines, maintenance of office equipment in general. That led us into toolkits, ahead of the new computers that were coming along, as well as aviation toolkits. Computers then were enormous and needed a lot of tooling to maintain them. At that point in the 90s, we were in this warehouse unit in Park Royal, no shop anymore, achieving ISO9000 quality accreditation around then too, which I’m very proud of. We built the business from then on pretty much into the service and maintenance of tools. That’s quite the pivot. No wonder you have survived this long. By then the cable TV industry had become quite big. What we know now as Virgin Media used to be about 20 different cable companies that came over from America. It meant that they dug all the pavements up and they actually started to run a cable to a lot of the houses, and then you could get 20, 30, 40 different channels, which served Mills very well. They were able to also run telephony, as they called it, telephone lines down that same cable. That was the start of the cable TV revolution; we were quite a big part of that during the nineties. Cable TV led into telecommunications, and now we’re one of the biggest distributors to Openreach, Virgin Media and CityFibre; this was covering a lot of the tooling that’s used for telecommunications. Then COVID happened. Everyone was working from home and needed a better fibre connection, which drove all these new Altnets and private telephone companies to invest in fibre networks as an alternative to BT. Therefore, telecommunications became a big growth area to Mills.
I love business. I love the way that you have to evolve, you have to change. I don’t think there’s one business that has stayed the same. You have to keep moving. You’ve got to be looking at what the next challenge is.
MARCH 2024 Volume 46 No.1
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