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

Guardtech constructed their first ever cleanroom 25 years ago – Director Ray Wheeler explains how we became the business we are today

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 service to the industry we knew – and cleanroom consumables sales growth had slowed due to competition from a global player.”
 Back in 2000, Ray and his mentor Bert Cooper had taken consumables company Guardline Disposables from a business turning over £1m to £4m in 10 years. New thinking was needed to grow the business, hence three new cleanroom services were added – cleanroom garment processing, cleanroom decontamination and cleanroom construction.
 As well as designing and constructing the new in-house garment processing and cleanroom packaging facility, the Guardline team started supplying flatpack 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!”
 The success of the Isolagen project rapidly led to larger cleanroom requirements and two more 100 sqm units were built on the site in the next two years. Micro-electronic factory builds and other applications grew the business beyond the Biotechnology projects that helped expand the knowledge base during the early 2000s.
 From there, Guardtech Cleanrooms was established as a separate business and not just a division, and that business would go on to provide controlled environments for leading Life Sciences, Healthcare and High-Tech Engineering firms all over the UK.
 The Isopod flat-pack division is now the rapid build 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 the modular division, 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.
 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 exciting was that to start a new division and for it to grow so quickly!’
 Ray remains a true salesman and problem solver 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 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, 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.