Gartsherrie Engineering
The Sales Director hire who became Managing Director — and reshaped a Scottish engineering business from the inside.
Client Overview
Gartsherrie Engineering is a Scottish industrial engineering business supplying fabrication, machining and engineered solutions into the UK industrial supply chain. Like many established engineering SMEs, Gartsherrie had built strong long-standing customer relationships but had become commercially over-dependent on a small number of major accounts. Growing into new markets required a different kind of leadership and a different kind of commercial capability than the business had historically deployed.
The Brief
The original brief was to recruit a Sales Director who could break Gartsherrie's over-reliance on the existing customer base and lead a structured push into new industrial markets. This was a strategic hire, not a sales hire. The successful candidate would need to bring genuine new-business sales discipline, build pipeline in markets the business hadn't sold into before, and lead a small commercial team while doing it.
The Challenge
The Scottish industrial engineering market does not produce many commercially-minded candidates. The senior sales roles in the sector tend to be filled by people who have grown up as estimators or contract managers, technically strong but built around managing existing customer programmes rather than winning new ones. Finding a candidate who combined a credible engineering background with a genuine new-business hunter mentality, and who would also work inside a tightly run SME rather than a corporate, was the central challenge.
What Sales Recruit UK Did
Sales Recruit UK approached the brief by looking outside the immediate industrial engineering sector into supplier markets where the same buyers were targeted with the same product types. The SRUK Fit Score process identified candidates with proven new-business sales records who already understood the technical and commercial realities of selling into industrial buyers, but who had built their careers in roles where pure business development was the day job. The framing was important. The opportunity was positioned as a step up into a leadership role with team-building responsibility and the autonomy of a privately-owned SME.
The Outcome
Sales Recruit UK delivered a tight shortlist of three candidates. The Gartsherrie board was sufficiently impressed by the successful candidate's broader skillset that they pivoted the offer mid-process, restructuring the role from Sales Director to Managing Director. The candidate has since been promoted formally into the Managing Director seat and has made a material impact on Gartsherrie's market performance, delivering on the original strategic objective of opening new markets and reducing customer concentration.