Mark Wheeler, commercial director of Guardtech Group, explains how its formation can help improve overall experience for cleanroom clients.
Credit: Guardtech Group
The cleanroom design & build industry is faring well. Unlike many sectors, controlled environment construction hasn’t been torn apart by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Laboratory shortages continue to prevail, control is now at the forefront of people’s minds and the need for appropriate ventilation and critical workspaces has become more important than ever before.
After acquiring another construction company in Cleanroom Solutions, the directors at Guardtech Cleanrooms realised there was an opportunity to not only continue growing its business, but to compartmentalise all the different aspects of its offering to ensure its clients received the best possible experience in dealing with them.
From this, the Guardtech Group was born – made up of Guardtech Cleanrooms (modular builds), Cleanroom Solutions (turnkey construction projects), Isopod Rapid Cleanrooms and CleanCube Mobile Cleanrooms.
The final piece of the jigsaw was the creation of Isoblok Pre-Fab Cleanrooms – a business which will continue to be developed over the coming years.
Mark Wheeler, the Guardtech Group’s commercial director, believes the move towards five clear, individual businesses will have a massive impact in helping his teams deliver excellent results for their customers going forward.
He said: “It’s about growth, it’s about opportunity and it’s about delivering the best possible service to all our different types of clients in the diverse range of industries we cover. Five distinct divisions all delivering a five-star service. That’s not to say we won’t continue to collaborate and pool resources across the companies, but this restructure provides a mechanism to differentiate between the variety of products and solutions that the Guardtech Group deliver, whilst celebrating the joint identity and culture that is at the heart of all these delivery formats.
“The Guardtech Group is a collective of long-serving industry professionals that embrace problem-solving, innovative thinking and embody a determination to deliver the highest quality outcomes for a range of valued clients across the Life Science industries.”
Wheeler explains how “at the heart of every decision the group makes” is its newly established GUARD Charter, which promotes the core values of: Guide, Understand, Adapt, Respond and Deliver.
“Each business within the group, and every employee working for Guardtech, is held accountable against this charter,” he continues. “We guide them to embody the values that have made our group strong over its history.”
Guardtech Cleanrooms will cater specifically for the modular cleanroom market, while CleanCube Mobile Cleanrooms will continue to provide portable solutions for business all over the world.
Isopod Rapid Cleanrooms offers a quicker, more flexible, and cost-effective alternative for clients – including the option for ‘flat-pack’ delivery and self-assembly installation.
Isoblok Pre-Fab Cleanrooms will be focused on pre-configured ‘plug and play’ cleanroom units and pods constructed offsite, while Cleanroom Solutions will deliver larger scale turnkey construction builds.
Mr Wheeler explains how Guardtech have grown “organically” over the past 20 years – and in that time, particularly recent years, product development and innovation had become core tenets of the firm’s philosophy.
“Those innovations have taken on a life of their own,” he adds, “developing in a way that they’ve become big enough to support their own divisions. We felt that this restructure was the clearest route to show our customers that there is a distinct outline in the way each element of the Group is run, yet with some central themes. These derive from the GUARD Charter I mentioned previously.”
Despite the restructure, the key elements of a Guardtech project will always remain the same.
“Across all the divisions, our approach is consistent,” says Wheeler. “Client-focussed problem-solving. With any of the businesses, we’re always looking to deliver all the values that the GUARD Charter embodies.
“We’re tackling different types of construction using the same quality standpoint and intellectual property. We wanted to compete with what was out there in the market without giving up the quality mark that’s a key component of our heritage modular builds.
“It was vital to us that Isopod and CleanCube enhanced the brand and did nothing to compromise it. The focus is on quality – we simply aren’t prepared to risk what we’ve established over 20 years of building quality cleanrooms.”
