25 years of Guardtech: the past, present and future as told by their founder

25 YEARS is a long time in business – especially for a business that’s growing at a faster rate than at any point in its history.

 Couple that with the fact the owner and founder of this business didn’t even think he’d be doing this 25 years later, it certainly feels like a little celebration is in order.

 “Did I think we’d still be doing this? Not at all!,” says Ray Wheeler, owner and founder of Guardtech. “It was an additional product because we weren’t getting enough new sales on cleanroom consumables.”
 Back in 2000, Ray and his mentor Bert Cooper had taken consumables company Guardline Disposables from being a £1m company to a £4m company, but Ray couldn’t find a way to crack Big Pharma and was looking at different ways to attack the market and grow the business.
 Given their long history working in and around cleanrooms, Ray decided to add cleanroom construction to Guardline’s portfolio, as well as cleanroom cleaning and a cleanroom laundry.
 This led to the Guardline team supplying flatpack Terra Universal cleanrooms – which soon led to the first ever installation.
 “The first one we built was a softwall cleanroom,” says Ray, “what we’d now call an Isopod Flexi. It was around 18-20sqm footprint-wise, ISO8 classification, for a company called Isolagen that provided an alternative to Botox. They developed a cell technique, taking the skin behind your ear, which ages the slowest and the least, and what they’d do is grow the cells and store them cryogenically, then re-inject them into customers’ wrinkles!
 “We were supplying Terra Universal flatpack cleanrooms as part of our wider Guardline offering – we'd previously sold two and this was the third one. 
 “But in this instance, I received a phone call from the person in charge at Isolagen saying, ‘When are you going to come and put it up?’ So, I said, ‘No, no – we don't erect them, we just supply them as flatpacks – we’re just the consumables company. 
 “But he insisted, ‘I need you to come and put it up’. So, I spoke to an engineer friend of mine and said, ‘Have a look at this drawing – do you think we can put this together?’ I then faxed back a price of £9,000. And they came back within minutes with a PO to say, ‘Yes! Come and put it up over the weekend’. So, three of us went down over the weekend and erected it!”
 That early incarnation of Guardtech would go on to deliver two more 100sqm cleanrooms for the same client before cutting their teeth on a more traditional modular cleanroom for Guardline’s cleanroom laundry – a project Ray considers to be the first “proper Guardtech modular cleanroom”.
 From there, Guardtech Cleanrooms was established, and that business would go on to provide controlled environments for leading Life Sciences, Healthcare and High-Tech Engineering firms all over the UK.
 That businesses is now the smaller modular specialist arm of the Guardtech Group, a family of complimentary brands offering different solutions for a wide spectrum of industries that require controlled environments.
 Alongside Guardtech Cleanrooms, Cleanroom Solutions – acquired in late 2021 – provides more complex and higher value large-scale turnkey projects. 
 Multi-award-winning shipping container solution Cleancube Mobile Cleanrooms has been delivering pre-fabricated, plug-and-play cleanrooms for everything from Oil & Gas or COVID-19 PCR testing stations to Cell Gene Therapy work, life-saving Biotech R&D to NHS Aseptic Pharmacies for more than six years now.
 The Group’s smaller-scale pod systems are covered by Isopod Rapid Cleanrooms – hardwall, softwall and hybrid quick-assembly flatpack pods that are the closest resemblance to that first ever Isolagen installation.
 Over the past 25 years, Ray has seen the Guardtech Group’s different divisions provide elite-level facilities for world leaders in their fields – but he’ll always have a soft spot for that maiden project.
 “There have been so many builds that I’ve admired from afar,” he continues, “particularly recent projects – from an engineering point of view, the likes of Elis Cleanroom, Contec, GKN Aerospace, Biocomposites are all amazing. But, for me, my all-time favourites have to be the first few we constructed – the Isolagen cleanrooms. Because I look back at those and think, ‘How on Earth did we do that?’
 “We we're really thinking on our feet – and we ended up having a great relationship with the client.” 
 Despite those massive wins, Ray remains a true salesman at heart, insisting that every win, no matter how big or small, means just as much to him.
 “I mean, there have been so many wins that I'm not directly responsible for – that the team brings in,” he adds. “But I love them just as much! If I could, I’d ring the bell myself every time! With sales being in my DNA, any order we get, I love it – I don't care whether it's £50 or £50,000 or £5 million. I love winning a cleaning contract as much as I love landing a multi-million pound construction contract for a global Life Sciences giant.”
 And so to the future – what does Ray think is in store for the Guardtech Group and the wider cleanroom industry?
 “With the trajectory we're on, you can see it continuing,” he says. “I don’t expect to see any change in our in our own growth or the cleanroom industry. There are so many different industries that require cleanrooms these days – and we’re really just adding to that.
 “I was talking to someone the other day who makes environmentally friendly cable ties. During the conversation, he asked what I did and then said, ‘You know, I think I might need a cleanroom soon – if I get the wrong pigment going from one production area into my environmentally friendly cable tie, it destroys it. I'm already thinking about trying to make the area clean – but I’m probably going to need to make it cleaner! What do I need to do?’ There are just so many different areas in which particle control and contamination control is so critical – it's not going to go away.
 “When it comes to brands of ours like Cleancube or Isopod, or our traditional modular builds with Guardtech Cleanrooms and Cleanroom Solutions, having that flexibility, when there’s already a premium on space all over the UK and beyond, I can only see those areas of construction growing. As a team, we’ve been on the sharp end as innovators – and we need to ensure it stays that way for many years to come.”
 For more information on the Guardtech Group, email sales@guardtech.com, call 0330 113 0303 or visit www.guardtech.com.