A Vision and Hundreds of Factory Floors
“Everything I know about manufacturing I learned by getting on a bus, walking a factory floor, and asking questions until I understood the answer. That is still how I run the business today.”
The Long Way to Hangzhou
At Portora Royal Grammar School, I walked into assembly beneath honours boards carrying names like Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. As a boy from a farm in Fermanagh, they made the wider world feel reachable. Determined to see it, I went to Taiwan in 1994 to teach English, then spent two years learning Mandarin so I could do business in it.
In a Chinese factory, the sales people may speak English, but the engineers and quality people work in Chinese. I needed to speak to them directly. Mandarin opened the door to frank conversations, and I still run our operations meetings in it today.
The job that followed was quality control and merchandising for a Taiwanese agent whose clients included Mary Kay and Office Depot. I spent four years inspecting factories across Taiwan, learning what they could genuinely build and who already trusted them. That work became the start of Diversitech Global's factory qualification system.
The Lesson That Built the Company
In 1998, I partnered with the inventor of Mr. 7 Hands, a patented 7-in-1 screwdriver. I redesigned it for safety, wrote the packaging and sold it into Switzerland and the UK. When I moved the business to mainland China in 2001, that product opened the door to a meeting with Target Stores, whose hand-tool programme had a quality and presentation problem. We won the business: a 23-SKU household and automotive tool assortment, launched under the Durabuilt private-label name in 2002.
Winning the programme and delivering it were two different problems. I was responsible for product quality; our assembly partner controlled the purchase orders, and his incentive was a cheaper supplier where mine was a better one. Watching quality move with those decisions taught me the principle Diversitech still runs on: quality doesn't start at inbound inspection. It starts at the purchase order. I moved to Xiaoshan, Hangzhou in 2003 to take control of that decision.
Building It Twice
The joint venture started the following year to put purchasing control in our hands. By 2006, we had transitioned to an independent operation. The team that built the first three years stayed, and our former partner continued as a supplier rather than an owner. I built this company, then rebuilt it on my own terms, with the people who had already proven they could do the work.
Customers needed genuine differentiation, so we began opening our own tooling and building products exclusively for them.
The Same People, Still at the Table
Twenty-five people on the management team have been with the company 15 years or more, and 15 for over 20 — many since the first Target programme. One of my longest-serving colleagues, who now runs finance, operations and HR, has a phrase I've built management practice around: "horses for courses" — the right person in the right role as the business changes.
The other rule I hold the company to: you're only allowed to make the same mistake once. Make it, learn from it, and move on.