WHO IS?
Richard was born in West Yorkshire in the mid 60’s, son of a Sales Manager who worked for an international company that manufactured business machines. From an early age it became clear to his parents that he was more a “hands on” person than an academic. He would spend countless hours pulling broken typewriters and photocopiers to bits to see how they worked before putting them back together fixed, rather than doing his English homework!
After leaving school at 16 with a hand full of 'O' Levels, he entered full time employment as an electrical apprentice. He quickly gained a broad experience in many aspects of electrical control units and their design, manufacture, testing and installation. He soon started to establish quite a reputation, having identified how to treble production of certain components with no additional costs. Unfortunately (or fortunately) he was made redundant when the company folded.
He soon found more local employment with another local company, a World leader in automated systems. Their core products were supplied into the poultry processing industry. They also designed and supplied “state-of-the-art” microprocessor control systems for many other automated processes. These included steel production/rolling plants, portable blood dialysis, CNC applications, automated stock storage and retrieval systems.
They were pioneers and world leaders in the high-speed weighing and distribution of poultry on overhead conveyors in abattoirs and had installed systems in around 60 countries.
Commencing employment as a junior assistant and leaving many years later as Sales and Marketing Director, he became renowned for performing a wide range of duties, which would traditionally be beyond a person of his age. At the age of 19, the company was in some difficulty and had no engineers available to install equipment in 2 factories in the USSR. Several million pounds were being held back from the main contractor. Richard volunteered to go and his employers had sufficient confidence in him to agree. At a time when, in the USSR, you were totally isolated from the outside world with no chance of communication, he successfully completed his mission and the contract was fulfilled. From being in his early 20’s, Richard gained such a reputation that he was frequently invited into the boardrooms of many major food processing companies in the UK and several around the World, to troubleshoot their problems or look at introducing new and cutting-edge technologies.
In the mid 90’s Richard started Hawley Associates and specialised in the evaluation/streamlining of existing food processing facilities and the design, implementation and project management of new installations. "We were generally contracted to either, a specific equipment manufacturer, to represent their interests in a particular project, or to the food processing company directly, to improve or rationalise their existing operations."
In more recent years Richard has focused on being a specialist food business troubleshooter and has become accustomed to being called upon, often at short notice, to analyse, dissect and identify solutions to major problems faced by individual food production businesses. Whether a small to medium sized, single location company or a multi faceted PLC, Richard can be relied upon to quickly understand a troubled business’s operations and issues, enabling him to use his rare capabilities as a multi-dimensional thinker and clear, balanced judgement along with vast experience to identify solutions and ways forward.
As Richard puts it “ To troubleshoot or improve a food manufacturing business that I know little about is much the same as repairing that broken photocopier when I was 14. It’s simply a case of seeing and understanding the problem then being able to take the side cover off to analyse all the operations and processes involved to identify where things start to go wrong and how to fix it or do it better”
By utilising over 25 years worth of experience gained form seeing many hundreds of food production factories in operation across four continents, he is uniquely placed as a specialist food processing consultant to help reduce your costs and increase production efficiency, manage the design and implementation of new facilities or help integrate new acquisitions into the existing business.
By bringing in a specialist who has the ability to quickly understand how all the operations and processes relate and fit together and, who is then able to consider the issues and possible solutions in a multi-dimensional way, you will open up doors and avenues that are often invisible to those close to the business.
