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Aug 2020
This year the Millennium Coupling Company is celebrating 20 years importing, stocking and distributing quality hose couplings and associated items.
That’s 240 months of working with the offshore, petrochemical, mining and industrial sectors to supply a comprehensive range of products for the safe and effective transport of chemicals, steam, air and water.
It’s even 7,300 days spent ensuring products are available in a variety of materials (plated iron, aluminium, brass, stainless steel & polypropylene) with different thread forms (BSP, NPT etc) and are fully interchangeable with other manufacturers.
But it’s not just one company any more.
In 20 years, what started as only the Millennium Coupling Company has expanded into the R&G Fluid Power Group employing 362 people with UK sales of £54M.
So, how did this happen?
It takes two
Starting with two employees in February 2000, the business began in office and warehouse space inside the Preston FedEx hub. Not being able to afford rent, they instead paid extra on each parcel shipped – as they grew, they took more space and sent more parcels. A winning formula for both parties.
Three years on and FedEx were moving. Millennium Coupling Company moved with them, now with eight team members, including founder Chris Ford with his wife Suzanne managing the accounts department. A busy team with family values.
Year on year growth meant they could purchase a four-acre green field site and develop their own warehousing unit. In 2005 they moved into their purpose built 8000 sq ft unit. A proud moment for a company that had started with two employees just five years earlier.
To the far side of the world and back
Now well established, in 2006 the Millennium Coupling Company started to expand with new businesses. Initially this was building a new 10,000 sq ft warehouse on their existing site to accommodate Century Hose Ltd.
In 2008 they purchased Flexicon Liverpool and started Integraflex in Teesside. A further branch of Integraflex in Sheffield was incorporated in 2012.
What had started as one firm with two employees had now become a group.
The next step was to expand overseas. Millennium Coupling Company France was the first in 2009, followed by Millennium Coupling Company Germany and Millennium Coupling Company Australia in 2015.
2017 was a pivotal time for the Millennium Coupling Group when a decision was made to downsize and trade only in the UK. All overseas operations were sold and a UK acquisition plan put in place.
Becoming R&G Fluid Power Group
The R&G Fluid Power Group was formed in 2017 by Chris Ford and Brian Scowcroft to acquire the whole of the Millennium Coupling Company group. Since 2017, R&G Fluid Power Group has added carefully selected businesses to the group acquiring, not just some successful businesses, but also the UK’s most experienced fluid power senior management team with hundreds of years of technical and commercial trading activity in hydraulics, industrial hose & fittings, pneumatics and sealing products.
The group now employs 362 people, but the drive, customer focus and family values of the early years have not been lost.
You can still rely on Millennium Coupling Company for quality hose and associated products, but you can also turn to the wider group of companies for other market leading fluid power components.
A note from Chris Ford
“As Millennium Coupling Company we celebrated our first £10K sales month with a bottle of champagne, as I popped the cork the sales representative from Holmbury arrived unannounced and the cork hit him, needless to say he enjoyed a glass with us and eventually he became an employee!
“20 years on we are still celebrating with champagne – the numbers are bigger but no one else has been hit by a cork! I am proud of what the group has become in just 20 years, with 24 firms providing a comprehensive range of fluid power components and services to OEMs, distributors, systems integrators and end users across all industrial sectors in the UK”
