Agency in the Workplace: Airmaster

Airmaster
is an employee-owned heating and cooling company based in Sheffield
with a national reach.

Starting
out in air conditioning, the business has expanded to become a £9m
turnover mechanical services contractor, which unusually for its
sector has been owned by its workers through an employee ownership
trust since 2021. The trust was set up to create a path to retirement
for its founders, as well as helping to safeguard its working culture
and build deeper involvement from its workers.

Lisa
Pogson, Managing Director at Airmaster, told us more about the
transition from traditionally-owned business to employee ownership
trust – and what could happen once the company’s founders have
been fully bought out by its workers.

How
has having ownership in your workplace changed your life?

I’ve
been with the business for a while, pretty much since it started in
‘92. It was my brother-in-law’s business which he started,
literally on his own in a van. I was helping out with bookkeeping and
things like that and came to the business full time in 2001.

In
2021, we managed to find a way for the founders to sell the business…
[The founders] said, well, why can’t we do that ourselves and let our
own team run it [through an employee ownership trust]? So that’s
basically what they’ve done.

What’s
changed now is everybody in the business is part of the team,
literally part of the team because they’ve got a say in what happens…
We are still paying off the founders, which is a challenge because
you’re using the profitability of the business.

But it also means
that people are working for that profit for a different reason –
because then at the end of that they will have their say, which is
great. People have said that they feel much more involved, much more
in control. As MD, that is a really nice feeling – that we are
making a legacy for the team that we’ve built. So that’s how it’s
changed my life.

Do
you have any commitments that you hold that are important to you to
honour in your work?

I
think part of the reason… this type of employee ownership trust was
a good fit for our business was because [the company] was dealt with
as if it was giving people a say already. So the fit was good and
it’s carried on that way.

I
still feel committed to the team. I think I am a little bit more
mindful when I do things that there’s a lot of people behind that
decision – it’s not just me. I’d like to think that I have the best
interest at heart, and I always have, but I think it does feel a bit
more important to me now that it’s their business.

Why
is that important to you?

Because
it’s always been a bit of a family business. It started out that way
and we’ve kept saying that it’s got a family feel.

In
2016, we lost our joint MD… He had cancer and passed away in 2019,
and part of our plan was that we were going to do a buy-out. We
didn’t know about the employee ownership trust [option], but we knew
that we wanted to do it in some sort of way to involve all the team
in it, because we wouldn’t be able to afford to do it on our own.

I
think that family feel, that ethos is carried on through me. We did
go through two trade sales that didn’t work out, and I’m so glad they
didn’t, because they wouldn’t have kept the ethos of the business,
the family feel.

What
would you like to see happen next?

I’d
love that we can pay off the founders, which hopefully will be in 18
months’ time. Because that is a challenge and obviously you’re
eating money while you’re growing. So I’d like to see the founders
paid off and a bit more of a move towards an employee council. I
don’t like the word council really, but a bit of a cooperative thing.
I have been speaking to Cooperatives UK and just trying to get a feel
for having a bit more of a committed team.

I’d
rather people [at the company] get a bit more involved. We are trying to move that
way, with having staff opinion without pushing too hard, because some
people genuinely don’t want to own a business and we sort of impose
that on them. But I still know that they want to have a say in what
we’re doing.

What
do you need from the community to make that happen?

I
do need the Airmaster community to get a bit more understanding of
what it’s like to be an owner, so I’m trying to get a bit more push
towards that. The [South Yorkshire] Ownership Hub… I think what that has given me is
some extra connections that I didn’t have and didn’t utilise. Before
we did the trust, I didn’t utilise the Employee Ownership Association
enough and I think I need to use that a bit more, and Cooperatives
UK, because they’ve got lots of people that have done it.

When
me and Mark were originally looking at how we could buy Airmaster,
Gripple was one of the companies we looked at. They have been really
helpful in supporting us and hosting things for us, and really open
about how it’s a very different way of doing things, because they’re
[run with] direct [employee] shares rather than a trust.

I
think that for me, it’s the employee engagement that’s really
important. You’re not going to get everybody engaged, and I get that,
but you’ve got to get 70-80% of the people on that journey with you
and the other ones that are happy to do what they do. I think I need
to continue to keep those networks going. I don’t think there’s
anything additional I could ask for – they’ve been really
supportive.

If
worker owned organisations became the norm, how would communities in
South Yorkshire change?

I’ve
lived in Sheffield and Rotherham all my life and I’m 54. People are
quite parochial, but they’re also quite proud of where they come
from. I think it would help to support growth in the area because
people are too, ‘It’s always the boss who tells me what to do and
the boss is bad,’ and it’s very difficult to do that if you’re
the boss. I’ve seen that from when my brother-in-law started the
business and then all the things he learned about his boss, he
became.

There’s
lots of owner-managed businesses [in South Yorkshire] that have
elderly men that don’t want to let go and a lot of it is because
they’ve got a real connection to their businesses. Some people say
it’s greed and I don’t agree – I think people have grown businesses
for the best reasons. Yes, they’re making money out of them, but they
also want to pass them on to somebody and not everybody’s got that
person that can pass them on to, even if they’ve got family.

I
see a real positive way for those businesses to get passed on.
Because what happens [otherwise] is that it gets sold on because
that’s been the only way for the owner-manager to really realise some
cash out of the business for their pension. So they get sold on,
quite often outside the region, and broken up. I think that’s the
problem– the only way for them to realise some money out of the
business is to sell it. And there is a way to sell it, but to sell it
to the team that you trust, to pay you off but also to leave them
with that legacy.

So
what we’ve got now… we’re halfway there. I’d love to be interviewed
again when we’re all the way there. We’ve got some older ones of us
still here with the knowledge, but we’ve also got a young team of
people that can take this forward and that’s what I think would be
good about it being the norm – that things can carry on, instead of
getting broken up and the legacy of the knowledge lost. I think
that’s such a shame.

What
meaning was made for you, if any, by the conversation we just had?

I
think it’s just made me think a little bit more about what we need to
do. I think that ‘collaboration’ just keeps coming up in my head.
Collaboration is really important… [It’s] about the communities
turning this into the normal working practice. It’s the
collaboration that you’ll get which is wider than just that one
business… You build stepping stones to other people. It’s a
network.