Businessman of the year: Double success for Rochdale company

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Business Man of the Year - Stephen Grindrod (left)and Daniel Shackleton (right)
Rochdale Business Awards 2012

At the Rochdale Business Awards, Daniel Shackleton and Stephen Grindrod were named jointly as Businessman of the Year.

They are both directors of Salt Separation Services; a highly specialised company that designs, manufactures, installs and commissions of water treatment equipment. They supply desalination plants to the cruise industry, the Department of Defence and the gas and oil industry.

The company’s products are very highly technical and the equipment that they supply can vary in size from one metre cubed up to 200 metres cubed. Their plant uses Reverse Osmosis or NanoFiltratrion to produce drinking water from seawater.

Their products are sold and installed all over the world and you find them everywhere from oil platforms in the North Sea to nuclear submarines prowling the depths of the world’s oceans. The company operates from its premises off Oldham Road, Rochdale.

When we spoke to company director Daniel to congratulate him on his success he was modest about his achievements and expressed his ‘surprised and delight’ at winning the award. He told us that he had originally nominated his company for the ‘Business of the Year’ award but had been persuaded instead to accept jointly, with fellow director Stephen Grindrod, the Businessman of the Year award.

Daniel told us: “It’s a team effort. Stephen and I share an office and have worked just as hard as each other to make the company a success. Just giving the award to one of us wouldn’t have been fair.”

Daniel spends much of his time abroad searching out new business all over the world and concentrates on sales. Stephen’s focus is on the technical side of the business and works on the installation and commissioning of new systems. Daniel succeeded his father, Kevin Shackleton as a director five years ago.

Stephen went on to tell us that the company were highly involved in life-extension programmes on aging oil and gas platforms. Conversely, he said that the decommissioning and dismantling of many older and redundant platforms also brought a lot of work in for the company and was very labour and equipment intensive.