Celebrating 40 years of Algar Air

Lots of businesses start with a big idea. Algar Air’s origins were built around a very simple one: my Dad, Geoff Algar, set the business up with my Mum when she was unable to work. Mum had had an accident which kept her out of action for a while (she’d broken her arm falling out of a camper van).

Dad was a self-employed air compressor engineer, working as a contractor to a local company. But when Mum had her accident, Dad saw the opportunity to start up his own business with him as chief engineer and Mum handling the admin. Although technically off the ground in 1984, it was 1985 before things were properly established (hence using 2025 as our anniversary).

For a little while, Algar Air’s HQ was our family home. Then, as the business grew, Mum and Dad bought a two-storey building, which was effectively at the bottom of our garden. It became the workshop until we moved to our current site in 2005.

Becoming a family business

My brother [Engineering Director Stephen Algar] and I joined within a year of each other in 1999 and 2000. I’d worked in banking but Mum and Dad were eying retirement (something that, in the end, took another decade to materialise) and we all wanted to keep the business going.

Now my son is off to college on a path to become a chartered engineer. I have no idea whether he’ll want to join the family firm. Whilst that would be lovely, in some ways I’d be wary of it, because there’s always a perception that if you take over your family’s business, you have in some way had everything handed to you on a plate and that life is easy.

That certainly isn’t the case, and after 20 years with Algar Air I can look back on some points that proved extremely challenging.

Tough times

We’ve weathered a fair few market crashes and recessions. Mum and Dad managed the economic downturn in the 1990s. Myself and Stephen steered the business through the market crash of 2008/9.

As it was for so many people, the pandemic was just horrible. We were fortunate to eventually be deemed an essential business, so after a couple of months of extreme stress we were able to restart trading.

Before then, though, I remember crying as I typed out the furlough notices. I remember wondering how long everything would be closed for, and at what point we’d be forced to shut up shop. And then began the long haul back to normality, playing catch-up with months of backlog, which also proved so challenging.

Big brands and SMEs

One of the things that has helped us through challenging times is that we’ve always diversified, working with a range of client businesses over multiple sectors, so that if one sector faces tough times, another is likely to be relatively buoyant.

Today, we’re proud to have a client portfolio that includes the public sector (local authorities, hospitals, HMPS), third sector (British Red Cross) and major brands like Rolls Royce, Kitlocker, Specsavers and Biffa.

We’re also enormously proud to have partnered with SME clients, many of whom have worked with us for years, if not decades. Our SMEs are enormously important to the economy of South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and it’s great to be able to play a small part in their journey, installing and maintaining their first compressed air system, then upgrading it as they grow.

Proud to be small

For years now, we’ve operated with a team of around ten. Our people stay – which is one of the reasons our clients put so much trust in us – and it’s rare that we recruit. Our clients stay too. We grow slowly by design, because we value the relationships we’ve built and the quality of what we do. We’ve never been interested in rapid growth, in nationwide expansion or in taking over the world.

Looking forward to Algar Air’s next decade, you won’t find any major transformation plans. But as long as Sheffield and the surrounding area needs compressed air, we’ll be supplying it.

So whether you’ve been a customer for most of those 40 years or just a fraction, thank you for the part you’ve played in our journey.