Homing in on further success
December 10, 2002
Century Homes has been one of the major success stories within the Irish construction industry over the last ten years. Headquartered in Monaghan town, it continues to go from strength to strength, as Chief Executive Gerry McCaughey is pleased to inform Kevin Carney.
The success story that is Century Homes takes some telling. Indeed one would almost need to utilise all the superlatives associated with the clichéd Celtic Tiger economic soubriquet to adequately chart the rise and rise of the famed timber framed home manufacturers.
Simply said, in sporting parlance, the team at Century Homes has the sort of work ethic, determination and never-say-die attitude that makes for supremely successful material.
Headquartered on Monaghan town's Clones Road with plants also in Dungarvan and Longford, Century Homes is a company which fails to recognise any sort of stumbling block as it careers onward and upward within its chosen marketplace.
Ever since its foundation in 1990, Century Homes has grown and developed in leaps and bounds with employee numbers increasing year on year in tandem with a constant increase in its volume of sales.
For example, some two years after its inception, the company was run by a staff of just seven employees and operated from a 5,000 square feet premises located on Monaghan's Cootehill Road.
Shortly afterwards it relocated to premises on the town's Clones Road, measuring 12,000 square feet. Nowadays though Century Homes boasts a premises measuring over 100,000 square feet and its employee numbers stand at 160 with an additional 80 workers in total in place at its factories in Longford and Dungarvan.
Giving vent to the McCaughey business philosophy that "persistence beats resistance," Century Homes has bucked the commonly held opinion which swept across the local landscape 12 years ago which declared that the novel product idea would never catch on nationally.
"We were told when we were setting up the company that people in Ireland were too traditional in they way they looked at things and that we would never sell the idea of timber framed homes to the public.
"But we persisted. We believed that the information the general public had at their disposal in relation to timber-framed houses wasn't adequate and the product itself wasn't being properly marketed.
"We needed to outline the facts relating to the homes we were manufacturing and to make sure that the customers were aware of the benefits of investing in our product because we could give them a guarantee that everything we were offering was quality.
"Really, we went about informing the public using guerrilla marketing tactics, that is to say we went knocking on doors, chasing up people who we became aware of that were planning on building a new home.
We set about using our resources to the maximum, confident that eventually our hard work would reap us an appropriate dividend.
"Business soon mushroomed once we got our message across. But I'd have to say that we wouldn't have done so well had it not been for the support we received from the people of Monaghan.
"That is why we have been eager over the years to help out with the sponsorship of various organisations and events.
"We have been keen to put something back into the community which has been very supportive of us," co-founder Gerry McCaughey recalls ... Once the general public's lack of knowledge of the timber framed product, per se, was effectively dealt with by the Century Homes team, the market began to open up, big time for the hugely progressive, go-ahead rookie company.
"Even when, in 1992, the interest rates shot up to 15 percent and the construction of mainstream housing projects virtually came to a standstill, we continued to prosper and grow and, in fact, we carried out more work that year than we did the previous year despite all the inherent difficulties," Gerry recalls.
Established by a team of four made up of Gerry McCaughey, his brother Gary and father Brian plus Jim Bride, all natives of Monaghan, Century Homes has seen its star rise and rise over the years to the stage where it is now the largest timber framed home manufacturer in Ireland and the second largest in Britain and Ireland.
And the success story continues unabated as Gerry is pleased to inform us: "We're flying right now; we're over-booked and partly because of that we've had to prepare to expand and, in that regard, we have plans already approved to expand our premises in all three locations with our plans for the Longford plant hopefully getting underway soon and the other two plants being extended within the next two years."
With the company rapidly consolidating its dominant share of the market domestically and also its share across the Irish Sea, Gerry McCaughey expresses the utmost confidence in the ability of Century Homes to piggyback on the expected increased demand for timber-framed homes in these islands.
"At the moment, 20 percent of new homes being built in Ireland are timber framed homes manufactured by us while in Scotland that figure stands at 55 percent. We aim to at least gain parity with the Scotland figure. "Timber frame buildings have gained a 20 percent share of the market in Ireland and we expect that the next 30 percent will be a lot easier attained because the ball is now rolling and we have a momentum going." So what has the product got going for itself?
"From the consumer's point of view, it makes a house a lot warmer for a start. It is much cheaper to heat than a masonry house and while it is warmer in the winter, it is cooler in the summer.
"From a builder's prospective, twice as many timber framed homes can be built as masonry houses in the same span of time and at the same price... "We have full faith in the product and we believe that as long as we can continue to get our message across to the consumer about the wide range of benefits afforded by timber framed homes, we will continue to go from strength to strength," concludes Gerry.
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