A bright spark in business

ALWAYS smiling, always working: Pam Pelham

MARTYN MEETS... Pam Pelham, former engineering apprentice turned entrepreneur
VERY little puts Pam Pelham off her confident stride — certainly not forthcoming minor surgery on a damaged ankle.

So on the day we met the managing director of AMP Wire, and the majority shareholder in AMP Fab, stuck to water under surgeon’s orders — one of the few occasions, I suspect, when this singularly independent woman has done as she was told...

Pam ~(44), lives in the middle of nowhere in the heights behind Delph and in addition to running her two businesses from premises at the Sun Iron Works in Chadderton, she finds time to mentor a host of young people.

Pam has time for them all... and also finds space in her busy schedule to scuba dive. She was off to the Red Sea within weeks of our chat, hence her eagerness to get the ankle surgery out of the way.

Pam has a restless, relentless energy which allows her to run around and still look utterly relaxed.

On the day we met she was not only contemplating surgery but also negotiating to add to her commercial and manufacturing interests through the acquisition of another business in the South.

From her early days in Springhead, where parents Alan and Beryl raised her and brother Steven, Pam has been in total charge of her destiny.

Father Alan had a background in motocross and this led Pam into spending her time in an engineering environment. While her pals were doing “girlie” things, Pam was playing with her Meccano set, Tonka toys and chemistry set.

And rebuilding her dad’s motorbikes — ‘I was a problem solver, I loved it’ — in the garage at the family home where Alan kept Nortons and Dots (a kind of scrambling bike).

On leaving school she got a job as an apprentice at Vindon Scientific in Diggle, easily persuading owner Jack Roylance of her abilities.

“Jack was great to me, a real mentor and when my five-year apprenticeship was complete we sat down and looked at my future together.”

That future led her to a job at a manufacturing business employing 350 people, mostly men, in Failsworth. Two and a half years later Pam was sacked. But the experience was brilliant.

“I had to cover for all the departmental managers but, to be honest, I never had trouble with any of the guys. I was always right...”

Pam discovered the owner was milking the business, and “when he knew that I knew, I was sacked”. A couple of months later it came out and he was disqualified from being a company director.

The experience was invaluable: Pam now had a hankering to set up on her own and got offices in the Chadderton’s Falcon Enterprise Centre.

She took a job as sales manager for European Instruments in Oxford. Her territory was the M62 corridor and she beat her sales targets by 400 per cent: “Yep, I did fantastic.”

Buoyed by this, she set up AMP Wire in rented premises at the Monarch Mill, Royton, Pam finding the work and Mike Wilson, who has since retired, making the products.

Her first order was for a pair of machine guards, total value £130, and from those humble beginnings Pam grew her business into two more units at the mill, eventually moving into a larger base at Failsworth before buying Sun Iron Works five years ago.

That represented an investment of £500,000, a true statement of intent if there was one given that five years ago the world was just about to enter one of the deepest economic depressions for a generation.

That first job Pam won was with a guy called Mark Smith, from a company in the Midlands, and nearly 20 years on Mark remains a customer.

Pam’s ambition and enterprise really took off when she won a Ministry of Defence contract to make storage lockers for new recruits, and another for drying room systems for squaddies returning from exercises.

Employment rose to 28 in those days and today, despite the continuing effects of the downturn, AMP Wire and sister company AMP Fab still employ 22 people.

The staple product is machine guards for customers all over the UK and Europe, especially Germany and Finland.

There’s a twinkle in Pam’s eye when she talks excitedly about the “special little one offs”, the jobs that challenge her enthusiastic workers.

“Customers come to us with problems and we delight in providing solutions,” she tells me with an unbridled glee. How could she fail to be enthused about designing a cage to protect fish eggs from predator fish? The team has also designed guards for the lights and laser-guided equipment on US Army armoured vehicles. “And there are other things I can’t discuss,” she confides.

Her business grew a couple of years back when she learned that Storetech, a specialist museums storage designer, was in trouble. Pam bought the business from administration, renamed it AMP Fab and has successfully integrated it into the team.

All the while she is the only female member of the Oldham Business Leadership Group, a board of private-sector people recruited independently to influence local public-sector strategy.

All too soon our time was up and Pam was itching to get back to work: she was missing her colleagues. Employees, yes, but as Pam says: “Everyone tells me it’s ‘our’ company — I just happen to own it.”

It’s no wonder Pam — and the AMP empire — are successful.