We interviewed Richard Brooks who’s been with the company for 20 years and who celebrates a work anniversary this week. Find out what he enjoys about his role, heading up the team of experts here at Watts Urethane and how he worked his way up through the company over the years to become our Technical Director.
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Transcript:
How long have your worked at Watts Urethane?
My name’s Richard Brooks, I’m Technical Director for Watts Polyurethane Products. I’ve been with the business for twenty years this week, during that time I’ve had many, many roles within the business. The role that I carry out today encompasses responsibility for all material selection, material development, product quality and materials quality, all the engineering aspects as you would expect, the new product development whether that’s an internal development or a customer supporting development, tool room – we’ve got a tool room function as well in the business now, and maintenance and all plant and equipment machinery inspection. obviously I don’t do all of this myself, I’ve got a fantastic team of chemists, engineers, scientists working with me to help me achieve these goals.
How has your job changed over the years?
so when I first joined the business, I joined twenty years ago this week and I joined as a Junior Draughtsman, a few years later I progressed to being Chief Draughtsman and from there I moved into a more technical managers role. I had several years as the Technical Sales Manager, which gave me some really good understanding of how to engage with customers and what customers actually wanted from a solution and how to investigate their problems to understand and get to the nub of the problem to give them the solution they were looking for. About 4 or 5 years ago I was promoted to Technical Director and we had quite a small engineering and technical team at that time. It’s now progressed and we’ve got 9 people working in the technical department.
We look for any new development that we could do that could bring some benefit to the business.
What do you like about living and working in the Forest of Dean?
Well I’ve lived in the Forest of Dean my whole life, I love the area, you cannot go out and get sushi at 2 o’clock in the morning like you can in Bristol or London but it is very nice with a young family just to have woodland on your doorstep, to be relatively safe. It’s a relatively relaxed environment in the Forest of Dean and you can let your kids go out and play quite happily.
What do I like about working for the business? It’s the variability. It’s obviously my fantastic team and the rest of the people in the business, I love the variability and the change to develop something completely new that brings a real customer benefit, that you can see from start to finish. That’s the thing that’s probably the most exciting when you done something when a customers been looking for a solution for a long, long time and we can crack it using polyurethane. Polyurethane is such a versatile material that you can tailor it to suit a customers needs and because of the range of functions we’ve got within this business, whether it’s the engineering team, whether it’s the tool making, we’ve got an in-house function for almost everything.
What do you do in your spare time?
With a young family I’ve not got a lot of time to myself to do what I individually enjoy any more, saying that I’m currently studying for my Masters Degree in Business, my dissertations due in 4 weeks so there is very little time for individual things. That being said, what I’m looking forward to getting back to once my children are a little bit older, is to get back to mountain biking downhill mountain biking which I was a big fan of going back 5 or 6 years. One of the main reasons I purchased the house I live in today is because it’s less than one mile to the top of a very well known downhill track in the area, so I want to get back to doing that. Also fishing, which the Forest of Dean is renowned for with the rivers we have. So one day maybe when I’m a little bit older, to get back into fishing again.