George Taylor & Co
A two-hire succession brief — Sales Manager plus General Manager — for a Scottish foundry planning ownership transition.
Client Overview
George Taylor & Co is a long-established Scottish foundry and engineering business, one of a shrinking number of foundries still operating in the UK. The business is tightly run, owner-operated, and built around a small commercial team selling specialist engineered castings and components into industrial buyers. Margins in the sector are tight, the market is consolidating, and the business demands genuine engineering knowledge alongside commercial discipline.
The Brief
The Managing Director and owner of the business had worked side-by-side with his Commercial Director for thirty years. With the Commercial Director approaching retirement, George Taylor needed a successor who could take over the commercial function and work directly with the MD. Looking further ahead, with the MD himself planning to retire within a few years, the successful candidate would need the potential to be groomed into a broader leadership role and eventually take over the running of the business.
The Challenge
This was a succession brief inside a tightly-run SME in a shrinking market. George Taylor needed someone with a genuine engineering background, comfortable inside a foundry environment, used to a similar type of technical commercial sales process, and capable of developing into a leadership role over time. The market does not produce many candidates who combine engineering credibility with the ambition and commercial breadth to step into a future leadership seat in a privately-held business.
What Sales Recruit UK Did
Sales Recruit UK ran a search across the UK engineering and foundry-adjacent sectors for candidates who combined the technical background with the commercial appetite. The SRUK Fit Score process evaluated each candidate not only on immediate fit for the Sales Manager role but on their longer-term leadership trajectory. Sales Recruit UK ran multiple meetings with the outgoing Commercial Director and the MD to manage the handover dynamic carefully, advised on the structure of the interview process, provided salary benchmarking to ensure the offer was attractive, and even contributed input on the contract structure for the successful hire.
The Outcome
Sales Recruit UK delivered a shortlist of five candidates across different career stages. After reviewing the shortlist, the MD made the strategic decision to recruit two candidates rather than one: the original Sales Manager role plus a more senior candidate brought in as General Manager, primed to take over the running of the business when the MD retires. Both hires are in post and the succession plan is now on a credible footing for the first time in the business's recent history.