For 15 years, Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. has been providing commercial clients and residential developers and customers across Munster, Leinster & Connacht with unrivalled plumbing, heating and mechanical services solutions. We popped into their Waterford base and caught up with co-founding director Owen Sheehan to find out more about this exceptional, market-leading operation.
As well as providing domestic developers and contractors with solutions, Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. specialise in a wide range of mechanical services (heating, plumbing, ventilation, air conditioning, gas, medical gas’s – including installation and maintenance), within the commercial market, from turnkey plant rooms and hospitals to schools, offices and high-end laboratory fit outs.
Founded in 2001 by Owen Sheehan and Brian Walsh, the company has always prided itself on achieving absolute client satisfaction through excellence in service, forging strong relationships with customers, project managers, consultants, architects and quantity surveyors alike.
Working professionally and as part of a fully-coordinated team, Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. has constantly evolved and modernised in accordance with the changing needs of the Irish market, remaining keenly focused on delivering a full range of solutions, in including large, complex and high-pressure mechanical projects.
Employing a crew of 47 fully-qualified, experienced and trained personnel at the time of writing and with ten vans out on the road servicing clients throughout the Munster and Leinster & Connacht regions, Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. delivers all projects safely, on-time and within budget. They have worked with a veritable Who’s Who of main contractors in the ultra-competitive commercial arena on a range of prestigious and varying projects including St John’s College in Waterford; Trinity College Dublin Stack B & Aras Na Phiarsaigh; W.I.T. College Waterford ‘W’ Corridor & S.E.A.M Laboratory Works; St Aidan’s 36 Classroom Primary School, Enniscorthy; University Limerick Kilmurry Student Village; Mullingar High Support Hospital Unit (HSE); The Haven Hotel in Dunmore East; Wicklow Educate Together Primary School 16 Classroom New School & SNU Building; An Post DSU Enfield; and The Bowery Night Club Restaurants & Bars Development, Viking Triangle, Waterford.
Considering that the construction sector is only now emerging from a deep recession, it’s quite remarkable to consider that Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. is currently performing at its optimal level in terms of turnover and manpower. This says more about the quality of the services provided than a tome of verbose adjectives from this writer ever could!
“We’ve seen good times, bad times and have been currently witnessing a positive upturn within the market and hopefully we’ll see a good long term stable period again,” notes co-founder Owen Sheehan. “We were geared towards housing developments in the early days but since then have diversified more into the commercial end of things, particularly offering complete mechanical installation.
“Essentially, we followed the capital spending programme. Roads and infrastructure was where a lot of the capital spending was geared but it’s now aimed towards health and education, and we do a lot of work in those areas.”
As a one-stop shop for all mechanical, heating, plumbing and ventilation services, Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. offers a complete package across the board, with everything catered for in-house. This has enabled them to develop strong working relationships with all the leading contractors in the industry with the likes of, JJ Rhatigan’s, Monami, Ganson’s, Mythen’s, Clancy’s, Kilcawley’s, The Sammon Group, S&K Carey’s and many more.
As is the nature of this line of work today, many projects have to be delivered in a live environment and in a time-sensitive manner. This ability to work under pressure has become a prerequisite, a minimum requirement and applies to two of the projects Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. has been busy on during the summer of 2016, both of which were time sensitive in that they had to be started in June and finished by September in time for the start of the new college semester.
“We had an extensive project at Trinity College, where they did a complete renovation of Stack B & Aras Na Phiarsaigh which we fitted with fan coil heating and cooling units plus a large amount of supply and return air ducting as well as full domestic services renovation. We also provided heating and plumbing services to a complete renovation of a number of accommodation blocks for University Limerick. Like all projects, these were driven by the programme and you have to meet and comply with the programme while ensuring that the highest quality of works is delivered.”
This is an aspect of their work in which Walsh & Sheehan boast a 100% success rate. They provide complete client satisfaction by focussing on even the finest details of every job. “Customer service comes first and this includes attention to detail and looking after the small things,” Owen confirms.
“We micro-manage every job and we generate and maintain constant, ongoing relationships with everybody we work for. We are very conscious of creating these ongoing relationships and always do our upmost to ensure a smooth delivery of our contracts.
“We also have a complete in-house management system and the company prides itself on doing everything in-house, from accounts to tendering, purchasing, quality management, project management, safety etc.”
How difficult is it to find tradesmen who can fulfil the exacting standards of workmanship that Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. insists upon? “You need the right type of manpower to deliver projects at the highest standards and it takes time to build that up. Over the last ten years, there haven’t been an awful lot of tradesmen coming into the industry, so we rely on the core crews we’ve built up over the years and they have always stuck with us. We’re very selective about the people we employ and we tend to have a slow and small turnover of staff to ensure we are familiar with all our operatives.
“There has been a ten-year gap, though, with no new tradesmen coming in and that will pose problems for the industry going forward. With the mass emigration of a lot of skilled tradesmen, parents understandably developed a fear of putting their children into trades and the obvious consequence of that is that we’ll have a shortage of quality workers in the industry somewhere down the line.”
Having said that, Walsh & Sheehan Ltd. are currently at the peak of their powers, generating more gainful employment than at any previous stage in their impressive decade-and-a-half history. “At our peak, pre-2007, we had 25 or 30 operatives and that went down to six in the depth of the economic crisis, but we have rebounded back up and beyond where we were previously,” Owen notes. “As a company we have learnt more about business in the downturn than we did during the boom years and this has enabled us to compete at a very competitive level while still maintain all our key services. There is definitely scope there for further growth but only at a rate we can control and manage our growth. You have to be careful not to take on too many unknowns and over stretch your resources.
“Our staff play a massive role in the success of the company,” Owen concludes. “Brian’s name and mine might be over the door but you rely on your men to carry out professional procedures and fly the company flag on a daily basis. We have a very strong structure, with our contracts managers and Brian Walsh overseeing the delivery of projects, as well as a senior foreman on every large job and a great crew of plumbers and pipe fitters with full office support at all times.
“Between ventilation, air-conditioning, heating, plumbing and the renewable energy side, the mechanical industry is a very specialist area now. You need a good ten-twelve years working in the trade before you can fully get your head around the different areas, whereas some trades would probably have covered all areas after three or four years.
“There’s a lot of specialist equipment and every job is unique and bespoke. They’re all designed differently and we work closely with the mechanical engineers and consultants who design the projects to ensure that it’s delivered exactly as planned.”
Walsh & Sheehan Ltd.,
Unit 25,
Westside Business Park,
Old Kilmeaden Road,
County Waterford.
Tel: 051 357850
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.walshandsheehan.com
Taken from Building Ireland magazine, October 2016, Vol 2 No 6.
