Operations Manager
Aggregate Industries

Paul S

00:00:03 My name’s Paul S and I’m Operations Manager for Aggregate Industries Building Materials North division. In my particular role, I look after five different manufacturing facilities, and an Operations Manager basically looks after the Health and Safety, manufacturing operational efficiencies and quality of product and output for those areas. We make wet cast pressed concrete products. One of the facilities, Charcon Specialists, will basically manufacture anything that you want within a concrete product, so you could come to the factory with a drawing, give us a drawing of anything that you wanted within concrete, and we would look at making it for you.

00:00:45 My mother and father were always absolutely – they worked their socks off basically, from whenever I can remember. In fact my mother, while bringing me and my brother up, managed to get a Masters degree and then a PhD while bringing us up. And my Dad was always working massively long hours. So I’ve always been driven to sort of make sure that I provide, and working – working as an Operations Manager has basically been able to give me the opportunity to do that. I was able to get on the housing market, I’ve been able to move around through work. I’ve been able to go on some very nice holidays and things like that.

00:01:21 School – I didn’t do too badly, but I didn’t do brilliantly. I mean I came out with 7 or 8 GCSEs – it’s a long time ago now – 8 GCSEs, a couple of A levels and I went on to University. But my grades at GCSE and A level weren’t A star type things, they were sort of Cs, Bs. But I really sort of – I found University a lot better. I got there and I really enjoyed the course work that I did, and so that really sort of motivated me a lot more than – than school exams.

00:01:50 I studied Product Management actually, so I knew Product Development, Design, Manufacturing involved with that as well. What I wanted to get out of that was – I was ideally looking to go into a sort of marketing role at that point, while I was at University. I spent a gap year doing marketing for an in-service teachers’ training company in Croydon. Which I did enjoy, but made me think that there was other – other areas that I might want to explore other than just marketing. So got back to Derbyshire, stopping at my parents’ house after University, luckily walked straight into a supervisor’s role within a local company. They tolerated me for the first couple of years, I got fairly good at it, and then moved on. That’s when I decided that I needed to go to a bigger firm, I needed to look for a bigger salary because I wanted to look at getting on a house – into the housing market. And the position at Aggregate Industries came up.

00:02:50 When I first joined Aggregate Industries I was 24 years old. There were a lot of guys within my team that were older than me and yeah, you know, you get called Mickey Mouse and all the rest of it. But you have to build up the respect of your team members, so I started off on the shop floor. So I went back almost back down to below sort of degree level and got to get my hands dirty. And just earned their respect through doing the job that they were doing, as well as they were doing it, and being polite. Asking them to do things, not telling them to do things. Making sure there was good lines of communication between management and the workforce. Very soon, you know, we got on like a great – a great bunch of – a really good team.

00:03:31 Where do I see myself in ten years time? I’m still looking for more operations to run. There is a definite scale of management within Aggregate Industries that – and the company is very good at allowing you to move within divisions and so on and so forth, so there’s a wealth of opportunity to move onwards and upwards. So I definitely see myself in ten years time, hopefully within the same company, and in a higher position.

00:03:56 ENDS