40th Anniversary Celebrations < Back

Last Friday, we celebrated our 40th anniversary at St. George’s Whisky Distillery in East Harling with 200 attendees including staff, clients, suppliers and friends from over the years. It was a joyous evening with food, drinks, music, magic and speeches.

The speeches included a wealth of Plandescil history delivered by our Senior Director, Julian Riley, followed by an insight into business as an Employee Owned Company from two of our new Directors, Carl Jenkins and Oliver Jones, who explained that they intend to continue Plandescil’s ethos of providing ‘cost effective engineering solutions’ to our clients as well as continuing our current commitment to staff training that has allowed us to grow a loyal workforce. Special mentions were given to our Wendy Burge, Ian Parrott and Carl Jenkins who have been with us 20, 24 and 28 years respectively.

It was also announced that Plandescil has now made its final payment to the Riley family for the purchase of the Company; the payment plan was initially expected to take 10 years from the day Plandescil was transferred to Employee Ownership on 22nd July 2016, however, amazingly it has taken just over 3 years due to the hard work of all our staff.

The speeches were proceeded by the presentation of two staff awards which were an idea put forward by Plandescil’s Employee Forum. The Employee Forum is a product of Employee Ownership and allows staff to have a platform to raise issues and present new ideas. The Forum decided on two awards, Rising Star and Employee of the Year, which were then put to the staff to nominate their colleagues who they felt most deserved the awards. The Rising Star award was presented to our Alex Fitzgerald and Employee of the Year was awarded to our Jasmine Ayton.

We would like to thank all those who attended and made the evening special; Andrew and Katy Nelstrop for providing the venue and all their staff for their service; Archers for their delicious hog roast; Lee Vann for keeping everyone entertained throughout the evening; Edd Crafer for blowing us away with his incredible magic tricks; Sugar Gems for the gorgeous cake that we are still enjoying and; Ragged Robin Florist for decorating the venue beautifully. Lastly, we would like to thank all our staff for their hard work and loyal service that has got us to this 40th milestone and made the evening possible. We look forward to the next 40 years and more in business.