KGD Industrial Services claimed both Excellence in Manufacturing and Engineering and the overall Business of the Year title after a period of remarkable growth. Managing director Ed Pitt tells Business Direction how long-term investment, apprenticeships and a determination to keep moving forward have helped the Hereford manufacturer build a global footprint from its Rotherwas base…
When Ed Pitt joined KGD Industrial Services as an apprentice in 1991, he could hardly have imagined that more than three decades later he would be standing at the helm of the company as its owner and managing director.
“I was an apprentice, and I forgot to leave,” he jokes.
It is a typically understated line from someone who seems more comfortable talking about the business, its people and its next challenge than dwelling too long on his own journey. But that journey matters.
From apprentice to owner and managing director, Ed’s story mirrors much of what makes KGD such a compelling winner of the Herefordshire & Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year 2026.
The Hereford-based company was named winner of Excellence in Manufacturing and Engineering before going on to claim the evening’s highest honour, Business of the Year. For a business that has often been quieter about its achievements than many far smaller companies, the recognition marks a significant moment.
“It is a real highlight for KGD to receive recognition of our efforts and to be considered a leader in manufacturing and engineering,” says Ed. “We have and continue to strive to improve our business, embracing technology, IT and AI with a strong long-term plan to grow and develop the business.”
Founded in 1982 by Ken George Davis, KGD has grown into a specialist design and manufacturing business employing around 140 people and turning over approximately £25m. Ed completed a management buyout three years ago following the death of the company’s founder, having spent his entire working life inside the business.
Today, KGD designs and manufactures packaged process plant, equipment and pressure vessels for sectors including oil and gas, petrochemicals, power generation, nuclear, renewables and food and drink.
In simpler terms, the company creates complex fluid handling systems – equipment that pumps, filters and separates oil, water and gas for some of the most demanding industrial environments in the world.
“We use 3D AutoCAD to develop our design and manufacturing drawings, which are then fabricated, welded, painted and finally reassembled, including all electrical and instrumentation, to supply customers with bespoke ‘plug and play’ packages,” Ed says.
“As the majority of our equipment operates in safety-critical areas, offshore and in nuclear power stations, everything is made to very stringent internationally recognised standards to ensure the integrity of our work and equipment.”
The result is a business whose impact stretches far beyond Herefordshire.
KGD has current orders destined for Norway, China, Mozambique, Angola, France and Teesside. Its work includes compressor packages used for pumping gas from offshore oil rigs to shore, systems for cleaning and recycling glycol, equipment for separating water and oil, cooling water packages for the Sizewell power project, work connected to Hinkley Point, and large compressor packages for a carbon capture project in Teesside.
It is a global footprint that many people living locally may know little about.
“You see what gets built in and around Herefordshire and it is phenomenal,” says Ed, with a distinct pride for his region. “Nobody knows about it.”
That desire to raise awareness was one reason KGD entered the awards. Not simply for profile, but to help people understand that major engineering and manufacturing businesses are operating on their doorstep, offering high-skilled careers and exporting expertise around the world.
The scale of KGD’s recent growth is striking. The company has grown from around £11m turnover to approximately £25m in three years. It’s an incredible growth trajectory, particularly given the conditions businesses have faced since the pandemic.
Ed is characteristically matter-of-fact about the achievement.
“It’s having a long-term plan,” he says.
That plan has included major investment in premises, technology, automation, training and people. In 2016, KGD purchased land on the Skylon development at Rotherwas and built purpose-designed factory units, which opened in 2018. Since then, the company has continued to expand and develop the site.
Over the past two years, it has invested around £2.5m to £3m, including the completion of an additional 1,500 sq m fabrication building with two 25-tonne cranes. It has also begun work on a significant building extension that will double its inspection and testing capacity.
The expansion is designed to remove pinch points in production and allow the company to keep increasing output as investment in automation and efficiency improves throughput.
“As the company continues to expand, certain departments become pinch points within our production,” Ed says. “We have identified that the facilities available for us to radiograph welds and carry out other visual and pressure test inspections have become inadequate.
“The increase in capacity will enable us to further increase our inspection team, take on additional apprentices in this area, and ensure this department is able to complement our increased production.”
Technology is also playing an increasingly important role. In the past 12 months, KGD has purchased two cobot robots for welding, invested significantly in automating pipe welding and continued to modernise its IT systems. The business is also developing its AI strategy, particularly around procedural and documentation improvements.
The company previously developed its own operational database in the early 2000s to carry information from drawings and parts lists through procurement, goods-in, quality and accounts. After years of additions and bolt-ons, KGD decided three years ago to rewrite the system in Microsoft SQL. That project is now largely complete and is expected to provide greater financial and planning control across the business.
For all the investment in technology, however, the clearest expression of KGD’s long-term thinking is its commitment to skills.
The company has maintained a consistent apprenticeship programme for many years through Herefordshire and Worcestershire Group Training Association. This year, it has recruited a record 12 apprentices to start in September 2026, taking its total number of apprentices to 32 across the four-year training programme.
They will work across welding and fabrication, electrical, welding and quality inspection, design and mechanical engineering.
For a managing director who began as an apprentice himself, the commitment is more than symbolic. KGD’s apprenticeship programme has become a core part of the company’s ability to grow. A number of its senior managers and supervisors are former KGD apprentices.
“The apprenticeship is our foundation if you want to try and grow the workforce,” Ed says.
But the company is not relying on one route into employment. It also runs a mature skills training programme, taking on adults from different employment backgrounds and training them over four to six months to become welders.
Some have come from sectors such as hospitality and social care. Others arrive from different industrial backgrounds. What matters is not where they started, but whether they can develop the skills needed to join KGD’s production team.
“We take two or three people on, normally from different industries,” Ed says. “We train them for four to six months to become welders, and then if they are successful they can go through into the proper system and be working full time.”
It is a practical response to one of the biggest challenges facing employers – skills shortages.
Rather than waiting for the perfect labour market to appear, KGD is building its own pipeline. Ed says the company needs to grow its workforce to around 160 or 170 people to match its current facilities, meaning it will need another 20 to 30 people.
The approach is direct and unsentimental.
“The choices are just sit and wait and hope, or actually do things which give you a much better chance of succeeding,” he says.
That attitude runs through the business. Ed is clear about the pressures facing manufacturers, from rising operating costs and wage pressures to energy costs, political uncertainty, tariffs and global instability. He says KGD’s operating costs have increased significantly in recent years, while uncertainty around steel tariffs and energy costs continues to make planning difficult.
Yet the company’s response has not been to retreat.
“If we start shrinking our workforce, a number of our overheads don’t get less,” he says. “The rates don’t get less. The support staff doesn’t shrink at the same speed. The energy costs don’t disappear.
“To me, shrinking your workforce is a backward step. I can’t service my customers without my staff. And I cannot recruit skilled staff quickly.”
Instead, KGD continues to invest, train and expand and that resilience was central to its success at the Chamber Business Awards. Here is a business that has doubled down on manufacturing, skills and exports at a time when many organisations have been forced to delay decisions or wait for greater certainty.
It is also a business deeply rooted in its local community.
KGD sponsors Pegasus Football Club, the largest amateur football club in Hereford, and has supported local sports clubs with practical help as well as sponsorship. The company recently manufactured a large staircase for Pegasus’s new pitch-side hospitality suite and has previously carried out similar work for a local rugby club.
It also services and maintains, free of charge, a hyperbaric chamber used by a charity in Hereford to support people with muscle injuries, disabilities and disease-related muscle wastage.
“We try and do what we think we are quite able and good at doing,” Ed says with characteristic pragmatism.
The company also regularly donates between £20,000 and £40,000 a year to charitable causes. Last year, through a charity function and auction, it raised £33,000, with £20,000 going to St Michael’s Hospice and £13,000 to the air ambulance.
For Ed, that local commitment sits alongside the company’s wider ambitions. KGD may be exporting complex equipment around the world, but its foundations remain firmly in Herefordshire.
The Business of the Year award is therefore not just recognition of impressive growth figures or technical capability. It is recognition of a company that is creating skilled jobs, investing in young people, opening routes for mature learners, backing its community and proving that advanced manufacturing can thrive in the region.
“I thought we would be deserving winners of the category, having been runner-up last year,” Ed admitted. “But the Business of the Year thing was a complete surprise. I didn’t really expect us to win that, but it was a very nice honour and an acknowledgement of our efforts over the years.”
In KGD Industrial Services, Herefordshire and Worcestershire has a Business of the Year that reflects many of the qualities the region will need in the years ahead – technical excellence, long-term investment, commitment to skills and a refusal to wait for perfect conditions before moving forward.
From an apprentice who “forgot to leave” to the owner of a £25m advanced manufacturing business, Ed Pitt’s story is one of perseverance and belief in building something properly. KGD’s success may not have been achieved with much fanfare, but perhaps that is exactly why it resonates. In an uncertain world, it is a company that simply gets on with the job.
www.kgd.co.uk
