Two weeks after buying a small pipe-fitting company in northeast England in 2002, Tony Wells discovered it was days from going bust. Wells had been based in America at the time of the acquisition and admits his due diligence hadn’t quite been up to scratch. At the time, the company, called Merit, had annual revenues of about £2 million a year.
Shoring up the balance sheet required drastic action. “I remember a manager at the time saying, ‘You’re firing a third of the people.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m saving two thirds.’ We weathered the storm and recovered the cash.”
But Wells, 59, had his sights set on much larger construction projects. Using his experience building new facilities for previous employers such as IBM, Motorola
