Paul Hayes Retirement

This week marks the retirement of one of our longest serving and most valuable team members, Paul Hayes, who started building mass spectrometry instruments for KCS Electronics in Crewe in 1995. KCS were contract manufacturing for Europa Scientific, and his team leader was Mark O’Connor.

When Mark was employed directly by Europa Scientific to set up a production area at Europa House in the late 90’s, Paul soon joined him and was soon promoted to team leader to look after the production area.

Coincidentally, his early work at Europa House was in the same building Sercon recently returned to, so he pretty much started and ended his career in the same building!

Paul took a break from instrumentation between 2004 and 2009, working at the Bentley Motors plant in Crewe. Within minutes of finding out redundancies were in the offing, Mark O’Connor messaged to say he needed Paul back – and he thought that was fate and returned to Sercon.

So, his current spell at Sercon started in 2009 until this week. During that time, as the business moved to Crewe Gateway, Paul was promoted to Production Manager.

Paul talked about his colleague Simon Moseley: “Production then was myself and Simon, my partner in crime – we just clicked from day one and have been best friends ever since, I was even one of his best men at his wedding.”

He hadn’t enjoyed working at Bentley: “I opened my eyes and I realised how much I enjoyed working for a small company, more like family than work collegues. It never felt like getting up in the morning for work.”

Paul has seen production grow from just Simon and himself to what it is today: “I became Production Manager and Simon now has become Operations Manager. Production is a good place to start and Sercon has been a great place to work. And I am happy that production is kept in good hands with Sam, Harry, Mark and the latest addition New Sam.”

The biggest thing he’ll miss? “The people.”

Paul’s plans for retirement include helping his wife Angie a little with her cat sitting business, looking after clients’ pets when they go on holiday.

Holidays are also a major part of the plan: “The biggest problem with working at Sercon is that I didn’t have enough holidays (everyone joked about this). All our money goes on traveling; at the moment I have visited 82 countries – more than some of the engineers here,” he explained. “We have just come back from the US and a week after I retire, we will be jetting off to Australia for 3 weeks. So, the big thing I am looking forward to in retirement is traveling. I will miss chatting to all the engineers about their travels abroad though.”

Operations Manager Simon Moseley had this to say: “Paul has been part of my working life – and social life – for as long as I can remember, and we will all be sad to see him go. He has been an integral part of making Sercon the success that it is now. Many of us are fortunate that he will remain part of our lives outside work and I have to say we’re all a little jealous of his plans! We wish him safe and happy travels!”

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