energystore MD on the importance of achieving net-zero, fuel poverty & family business

Connor McCandless, MD at energystore

We can be aggressive about trying to achieve net zero’: Energystore MD explains benefits of family business

The managing director of the Co Down insulation company talks expansion strategy and approaches to climate change and tackling fuel poverty

Running a family business is a dream for many entrepreneurs. But while these firms can experience great success, working with relatives can bring some quite mundane problems, too.

Connor McCandless, who is the managing director of Co Down insulation company Energystore, jokes that the quality of conversation at family meals may have fallen while he and his father, aunts, uncles and siblings have all been working together.

“If you go for Sunday dinner around the family’s house, you don’t always want to be talking about polystyrene insulation. We probably talk about it more than most families,” he says.

Connor says he is “passionate” about the work of Energystore, which designs, develops, manufactures and installs insulation products. He feels that there are big advantages to being a family business, namely that it allows the firm to more quickly tackle moral concerns.

The MD feels strongly about environmental issues, with Energystore committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2028.

 “We very strongly believe it’s the right thing to do,” he explains. “We have a bit more freedom to go more aggressively or more quickly towards net zero. If you’re the CEO at a FTSE100 company, not that many of your shareholders are going to be keen on you writing lots of cheques to get there really quickly, when they can kind of be more aligned to what the government is asking.

“And so I think we have a very reasonable degree of family businesses that are trying to push ahead because we have the freedom to control that and make that choice ourselves.”

Connor works in Holywood, the town where he grew up and went to school. The Sullivan Upper School alumni travelled to Glasgow University to study accountancy and finance, graduating in 2009 — an “incredible time to try to get a job”, he says.

“Applying for jobs in late 2008 as the financial crash was happening, particularly if your degree was in finance, going into the financial sector was quite limited. So I ended up working for a defence contractor.”

Connor worked in a variety of roles and companies in England, including with a renewable energy group, a treasury function at retailer Arcadia Group and a job on the transformation team at BT.

There were big changes to the family heating business while Connor had been away. In 2010, his father bought Energystore from the original owners, who had founded and run it since 1974.

Around 2016, Connor moved back home and took up a job with the family firm, wanting to use his experience in England to build Energystore’s business outside Northern Ireland.

“When I came back, we had no UK/GB base customers at all, as a business. I mean, zero pounds, zero revenue, no customers.

“My first role was to try to develop a business and a customer base on the GB mainland. It was more of a UK-focused role and to grow the business there.

“We opened three factories in four years and gained the largest market share within three years.”

Connor’s contribution to the company’s success earned him the title of EY Ireland Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist 2024.

For many years, the majority of the firm’s business was focused on polystyrene beads that are placed in walls and ceilings for insulation,

“These polystyrene beads aren’t that different to the stuff that was made 50 years ago by Energystore,” he says.

“But the thing that we’ve been quite successful in is that we’ve listened to the customer and modified application methods to solve problems that they have.

“We’ve been able to modify techniques for that. Our TLA product hadn’t been seen in the UK or Ireland until we brought it here, and now it’s in some of the biggest construction projects in the UK. It was the product used in Battersea Power Station.”

TLA, developed by energystore, combines expanded polystyrene (eps) beads coated in an additive with cement to create a pourable insulation.

He continues: “And then we’ve made a kind of a unique application of the beads for tenement housing in Scotland. I lived in tenement housing when I was there for four years. It looks beautiful there in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it’s pretty chilly.

“They’ve got these really big fixed stone walls and then you’ve got your inner surface of the wall inside the room. There’s actually a gap between those.

“So what we were able to do was work out a way to inject our system into that gap. It was a much less intrusive way to insulate than the other techniques available.”

Energystore has been growing in the past decade and now one in eight of all new buildings in the UK use the company’s products. The firm now operates from six locations across Northern Ireland, the Republic and Great Britain, employing 90 people.

On the back of this growth, it has been acquiring other companies in the past year, including loft insulation company Northern Loft in March and Scottish flooring contractor ATS, the acquisition of which was announced last month.

In the era of high interest rates, it is unusual to see a company so willing to spend to grow, but Connor believes Energystore’s strong relationship with its customers has given it a strong foundation for success.

“Typically, construction products are sold through builders merchants,” he explains, “whereas you can only buy our products for us. And that really means that people want to work with us.

“If we have a new idea or a new product, people trust us because we built that relationship, rather than having the builders merchant intermediary between us.”

“We have an approved installer network, and so, at the minute, we have around 200 companies that will be approved installers. We monitor and inspect their work and make sure it’s a quality outcome for the end user.”The company has been involved for some time with campaigning against fuel poverty, an issue that Connor feels is particularly acute for Northern Ireland.

 On Fuel Poverty

“In NI, we generally have reasonably low incomes, when you look at it at a European level. We have reasonably high fuel costs and we have quite inefficient housing stock.

“A lot of our housing is much older than it would be in the UK. At the minute, a new house is about six times more energy efficient than an average house in Northern Ireland. And so, if you ever move house to a new house, you’ll instantly notice the comfort level change and the cost of your fuel bill change. The easiest thing that we can do is to insulate homes.

“In terms of campaigning, we’ve been part of trade bodies working with fuel poverty charities. We’ll try to raise awareness in communities that might be struggling with these issues. Often we’ll end up supporting families free of charge because there isn’t support available to them, and things like that. But clearly you can’t do that all the time.

“We would really like to see a lot more support in that space to help families. When we look at supporting fuel poverty, it’s quite hard for it not to be a governmental aid conversation. Because, unfortunately, these families don’t have the money required to make that change to their insulation.

“They might often be in social housing or, you know, in a private landlord scenario where they don’t own their own home. I think all the parties and the civil service will probably all say: ‘I feel poverty is a terrible thing.’ And we recognise that there are established, reliable technologies that have been around a long time that can make an effective change there.

“The challenge is, with all the other issues going on in the country and in the wider world, that you need to find the money from somewhere — and that means not spending money on something else in order to spend it on this. And that’s a really hard decision for them.”