Celebrating its 95th anniversary this year, Exeter-headquartered
South West Metal Finishing (SWMF) has recognised more than 30 long-serving employees who, together, bring a combined 700 years of service to the business.
Established in 1931, SWMF provides precision surface treatments and finishing services for equipment used across the aerospace, defence, nuclear and engineering sectors. Employing 200 people across its four sites, in Marsh Barton, Exeter Airport, Yeovil and Chippenham, the workforce has tallied up an estimated 1,300 years of combined experience. With around 30 employees joining in the past year alone, the recent awards underpin the company’s mix of long-standing expertise with future talent.
Among the long-service honours is Kevin Baker, who celebrates 47 years with the company. Over a career which included roles overseeing compliance, quality, chemistry and the safe handling of the materials surface treatment depends on, he rose to become managing director. Now semi-retired, he leads SWMF’s apprenticeship programme alongside chemist Gary Ridgway, guiding intakes through training.
Damon Gill, group managing director at SWMF, said: “Having hundreds of years of experience across our team, with so many colleagues staying with us for decades, really is quite special in this day and age. Surface finishing is a highly specialist, critical industry where expertise is hard to come by. These aren’t skills you can learn from a manual, they’re high-level standards handed down person to person over decades.”
He continued: “That’s why bringing in apprentices and continually developing our team is so important. It’s about passing specialist knowledge to the next generation. Having Kevin lead our apprenticeship scheme brings that full circle. We bring five trainees through a year and when they visit customer sites to see where the parts end up, whether that’s Boeing, Airbus or Leonardo Helicopters, something clicks. When you nurture that talent early and show people there is no ceiling on their progression, they stay and feel they can build long-term careers.”
Finding a route into the industryThe long-service group spans every part of the business, and three of its members illustrate the range of routes people take into surface engineering – and how far those routes can go.
At the Exeter Airport paint division, production manager Janos Zombor arrived in the UK from Hungary in 2007 and spent his early working life as a chef. He joined SWMF in 2014 as a production operative, moved into spray painting within six months, and trained across every process in the business before becoming a quality inspector and, this April, production manager. He said: “I started from the bottom and slowly but surely worked my way up. The company gave me the opportunity every step of the way. I was a chef who ended up in the aerospace industry. I quickly fell in love with it, and it turned out I was good at it.”
In Yeovil, site manager Dave Barton joined in 2005 aged 20, about to become a father, when the site was still known as Reid Plating and working largely in zinc. He was made supervisor after five or six years, spent time in quality and inspection, and took on management of the site in late 2017 – having turned the role down twice. He said: “I never expected to still be here more than 20 years later, let alone to be running the site. I know what it’s like to start at the bottom here, which is why I’m now keen to support future talent.”
At Chippenham, office, accounts and personnel manager Sarah-Jayne Bell marks 34 years in October. She joined at 18 on a work placement, started in admin and accounting on a typewriter, and has since worked across personnel, data and analysis, customer quoting and account management, playing a central role in digitising the site’s processes. She said: “My role has grown and changed enormously over the years, and with it the level of responsibility. When my children were small, I worked my hours over three days, long before working from home was a thing. It meant I could watch them grow up and still have a career.”
The 95th anniversary sits alongside a continued commitment to developing new talent. SWMF launched its apprenticeship scheme immediately after the pandemic, having kept its whole workforce through it, to build skills in a trade where experienced electroplaters are notoriously hard to find.
Five apprentices are being recruited this year, with the scheme working closely with local colleges and schools and taking apprentices out to customer sites so they can see for themselves where the parts they treat end up. The programme is now being extended to look at what comes next, including further qualifications, with no ceiling on where people can go within the business.
Three of SWMF’s sites are NADCAP gold accredited, meaning the company has demonstrated exceptional, long-term compliance and superior performance during specialised aerospace and defence audits, allowing them to work across these industries. SWMF is currently recruiting across all four sites and is particularly keen to meet those with experience in electroplating, anodising, NDT and paint spraying.