Alistair Houghton meets MARK SEABORN, MD of Pennington Choices, in Runcorn
WHEN the public sector gold rush dried up, Mark Seaborn saw the light by pushing his company towards solar power.
Essex boy turned “adopted Northerner” Seaborn set up Pennington Choices in 2000 as a “multidisciplinary housing consultancy” working for housing associations and local authorities.
As the Labour government boosted public spending, so Pennington grew, helping organisations across the UK maintain and transform their housing stock.
But the credit crunch and the recession hit Pennington hard as clients cut spending even before the public sector cuts started in earnest.
Seaborn and the Pennington team could have retreated into their shells and hoped the storm would soon pass.
But, instead, Pennington bought a company in Kent to help it grow in the South-East. And now Seaborn has launched a division that installs photovoltaic (PV) solar panels – a new way to make money from skills Pennington’s staff already have.
“Life has changed,” said Seaborn. “There’s no point whingeing about it saying ‘if we sit here for two years it’ll come back’. That’s not reality.
“We looked at how we could use our skills for everybody’s benefit.
“In Solar PV, we’ve gone out to get the appropriate accreditation and skilled ourselves up.
“We’ve got all the skill-sets. We’re good at managing projects and construction. We’re good at working with the occupiers of properties, and we do electrical inspections and accreditation.
“We needed to bolt on some additional skills, but we were 80% there.
“So we are using our housing and surveying skills in other markets where we thought we could make a real difference.”
The solar panels business is focused on Merseyside and Cheshire, but Seaborn wants to expand it across the North West.
“We want to jog a little bit before we canter into a sprint,” he smiled.
Seaborn was born in Essex but grew up in Lincolnshire. After studying at Leeds Polytechnic, he became an environmental health officer in Portsmouth and Gosport, on the South Coast.
That work saw him inspect many homes in the private rented sector – his first foray into the housing world.
Next, he worked as a housing consultant in Birmingham before, in 1997, he moved to Liverpool to join Riverside Housing as regional director for Wirral.
“It was a great opportunity, and I learned an enormous amount from them,” he said. “And I met my wife there – she was a peer at Riverside. The rest is history.”
In 2000, Seaborn decided the time was right to set up his own business.
“When we started, it was just me,” he said. “I started the business in my back bedroom.
“Like a lot of people, I’d thought about doing it. Should I give up a perfectly well-paid job?
“But it was never about being a one-man band. It was about growing a decent-sized business.”
Seaborn shied away from naming the company after himself.
“I didn’t like the ‘Mark Seaborn Associates’ thing that other people who open consultancy businesses do,” he said. “I don’t have that much of an ego. And I didn’t have enough imagination to come up with something abstract.
“Pennington is the area of Leigh, in Lancashire, where I used to live. I needed a name, and it was as good as anything.”
Pennington soon won work with public sector bodies and housing associations across the UK.
Seaborn said: “Lots of the early work we did was management consultancy in the housing sector – investment appraisals, survey reviews, project management.
“We did very well out of the Labour government in the early 2000s. There were a lot of things coming out of government, promoting housing strategies.
“The key to our early doors success was that we were quite canny in terms of reading the market and watching what our clients wanted.”
Pennington adapted accordingly, once the era of blue-sky thinking came to an end.
Seaborn said: “Over our life, we have become more technical, mostly as a reflection of our clients’ needs, following the Labour government.
“In the early days, it was about new initiatives. In the latter period of their reign, it became about delivery.
“Our teams of building surveyors or gas engineers have become more significant because they’re delivering services and frontline tenant- oriented work. Our blue-sky strategy work has become less significant.”
Many of Pennington’s staff have worked for the kind of housing associations and public bodies that they now serve.
Seaborn said: “Look at what your average social landlord does – developing, financing, maintaining and managing property. That’s a fairly broad range of skill-sets.
“So we have most professional disciplines represented here – finance people, surveyors, energy advisers, housing strategy expertise. We’ve developed enduring relationships, and won lots of work through repeat business.
“People want people who are flexible, who are realistic, who understand the drama that comes with doing their work and who understand what the regulator wants.”
Even that service, however, could not protect Pennington from the credit crunch and the recession.
“When the credit crunch first hit,” said Seaborn, “we had a terrible six months. Our clients just stopped doing anything.
“My view of the world is that these things are as much about psychology as about actual cuts.
“If you go back to the credit crunch, nothing had changed in the public sector. Nobody changed their budgets, but they stopped doing anything for six months.”
“Housing associations – very little has changed in their world. But there’s less development activity going on.”
Psychological or not, those effective spending cuts meant turnover in Pennington’s core business “shrunk considerably”. And with the coalition Government’s very real spending cuts now kicking in, there is no sign of immediate improvement.
“The market has changed,” said Seaborn. “It’s about how we deal with the change. Trying to pretend it hasn’t changed is not tenable.”
The company had to make some redundancies as the downturn hit, but has since been able to recruit again. Today, Pennington employs around 40 people and can call on a pool of consultants around the UK.
Last year, Pennington bought Invicta Analytical Services, an asbestos surveyor in Bromley, Kent.
“It’s difficult to do business in London without being London-based,” said Seaborn. “We’ve bought Invicta because we want to build on it and sell our core services down there.”
Seaborn, meanwhile, is looking to grow the range of services his company offers.
In its solar PV business, Pennington will install panels not just for its existing clients, but for “Mr and Mrs Jones in the high street”.
Pennington is also looking at launching an HR consultancy service, and will offer a maintenance management programme for schools.
Seaborn said: “We do work in schools – in our asbestos arm, for example – and believe they need help with compliance activities to do with maintaining buildings.
“Most headteachers, unsurprisingly, don’t have the time or skills to do so. We can do it.”
Pennington’s MD is proud of the way his company is adapting to changing times.
“We’ve always been quite good at reading the market tea leaves,” he said. “We haven’t got a crystal ball, but we’re reasonably thoughtful.
“In the core business, we will continue to be an active player in the market. We want to be strong and ride out the storm.
“I’m sure there will be some companies that drop by the wayside. We won’t be one of them.”
Times may be tough, but Seaborn has no regrets about setting up his own firm.
“I didn’t set Pennington up to make oodles of cash,” he said.
“It provides me with a good living. But we set it up because we enjoy the work and we get oodles of satisfaction. We are helping make a difference to our tenants’ lives.”
Seaborn, who has two children and lives near Warrington, is a keen fundraiser for charity Parkinson’s UK, which supports people with Parkinson’s disease and funds research into the condition.
Seaborn did the Great North Swim this year, and has previously run the Great North Run.
“A friend who’s a little bit older than me has Parkinson’s,” he said. “That’s an important cause for me.”
