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Case Study:

How Hayward Tyler Group rediscovered its competitive edge

Hayward Tyler PLC had 200 years of engineering heritage, a global customer base, and genuine technical capability that most competitors couldn’t match. What they didn’t have was a way of making any of that visible in the market.

Over six years, RESOLVE became HTG’s global marketing operation – running brand, communications, sales enablement, digital, investor relations, recruitment campaigns, and supporting acquisition integration across the group.

The business grew from a struggling PLC into a £50M+ group that earned a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, had the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge open its new Centre of Excellence, and exited to Avingtrans PLC.

The situation HTG was in

The industrial pumps and motors sector was under serious pressure. Chinese manufacturers were undercutting on price, and traditional Western engineering companies – particularly heritage businesses with deep technical expertise but limited marketing capability – were struggling to explain why they were worth paying more for.

HTG was a case in point. A 200-year-old British engineering business operating across Oil & Gas, Renewables, Defence, Power Generation, Nuclear, and Chemical Processing – the engineering was excellent, but little of that came through in how the business presented itself. The CEO had acquired the company and taken it to PLC status, which brought financial stability but also a new set of demands: investors to communicate with, a market to lead, and a story to tell.

Then came the acquisition of Peter Brotherhood – a 150-year-old heritage brand in Combined Heat & Power (CHP) and Steam Turbines – which added integration complexity on top of everything else. Preserving two distinct brand legacies while building a coherent group identity isn’t something you improvise.

How the relationship grew

We were originally brought in initially to update sales collateral. That’s not unusual – it’s often where these things start. As we got further into the business, it became clear the need was much bigger than updated brochures. We understood the sector, we understood HTG’s customers, and we could see what the business was capable of if it communicated itself properly. The relationship expanded and we offered the plug-in marketing director as-a-service, providing both marketing strategy through to delivery. We ran the entire global marketing function.

We earned the expanded remit by doing the work well and demonstrating that we understood what HTG actually needed, not just what marketing agencies typically sell.

We have a clear methodology, but we always adapt it to what we find. At HTG, that meant going deep before going broad – talking to people across the business, from the shop floor to the boardroom, until we understood not just the products but the culture, the frustrations, the overlooked strengths, and the genuine competitive advantages that nobody had thought to shout about.

That process surfaces things you don’t expect. At HTG, it revealed patents the business owned but had never properly leveraged. It uncovered project stories that had never been written up. It found engineers who could talk about their work in ways that would stop a procurement manager in their tracks – if anyone had ever asked them the right questions. Information is everywhere in these businesses. The job is knowing what’s useful and what to do with it.

Rebuilding the brand

We rebuilt the HTG brand from the ground up – honouring 200 years of heritage while making the business feel contemporary and confident rather than merely old.

The work involved developing clear communication frameworks for each of HTG’s core markets: Oil & Gas, Renewables, Defence, Desalination, Power Generation, Nuclear, and Chemical Processing. Each had different buyers, different priorities, and different proof points. The brand had to hold together across all of them without becoming so generic it said nothing to anyone.

The Peter Brotherhood integration required particular care. Two heritage brands, 350 years of combined history between them, each with loyal customer bases who valued that history. We developed an approach that maintained the individual brand identities while building the group coherence that made HTG stronger as a whole.

Digital innovation – and how to talk about it

HTG was pioneering digital twinning technology at a time when most of their competitors were still selling on spec sheets. The Centre of Excellence brought advanced manufacturing capability that was genuinely market-leading. The challenge was communicating it to customers who were sophisticated engineers themselves – people who would see through anything superficial immediately.

We developed communication strategies that respected that audience: technically credible, specific about capability, focused on what the innovation actually meant for customer outcomes rather than how impressive it sounded. The work earned multiple industry awards from The Manufacturer and Siemens – external recognition that the approach was landing.

The proposal that changed things internally

There’s a moment in most long engagements where internal scepticism turns into advocacy. At HTG, this was it. The sales team had been sitting on a proposal for 18 months. It had gone in, been followed up, and produced nothing. The engineers were good, the solution was right, the pricing was competitive – but nothing was happening.

We redesigned it. Not the technical content – that was fine – but the way it was structured, presented, and made to feel. Within an hour of the revised proposal landing with the customer, HTG had a meeting request.

That’s the moment when people who’ve been sceptical about what structured, creative marketing can actually do start to become believers. The sales team had been perfectly comfortable with spreadsheets and technical specs. After that, they wanted to know what else we could work on together.

It wasn’t a one-off. As redesigned proposals started winning contracts that had been going elsewhere, the internal dynamic shifted for good. Competitors started remarking on HTG’s presence in the market – noticing that something had changed. That kind of external validation travels fast inside an engineering business.

Getting the operational story told

HTG was doing genuinely impressive things internally – digitalisation initiatives, lean manufacturing, Value Stream Mapping, 5S implementation, supply chain optimisation, and a new Centre of Excellence that was the largest single investment in the company’s history. our job was to communicate this effectively.

Engineers tend to take operational excellence for granted. If your processes are good, you know they’re good, and you get on with it. What often doesn’t happen is translating that internal rigour into something a customer can understand and trust.

We worked alongside the teams to do exactly that – turning manufacturing improvements into customer-facing proof points that demonstrated why HTG’s reliability, precision, and delivery performance were meaningfully better than the competition. In markets where a failed pump on an offshore platform or a delayed turbine on a power station project has serious consequences, that kind of evidence wins contracts.

Building the service business

Peter Brotherhood had a large installed base of refinery customers – legacy equipment in the field, relationships going back years, but no structured way of staying connected with those customers or generating service revenue from them.

We worked with the team to develop a proper through-life service model: structured customer training, a dedicated service portal built on Zendesk giving customers a single place to manage everything, and targeted campaigns to reconnect with the installed base. The model gave HTG a new revenue stream and gave customers a reason to stay close to the business between major projects.

When the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited

The opening of HTG’s Centre of Excellence was a Royal visit – William and Kate – the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attending what was, for the business, the most significant milestone in its recent history.

RESOLVE designed the complete customer visitor experience for the event and was responsible for overseeing the Royal visit itself. Getting that right – the sequencing, the storytelling, the way the facility and the people within it were presented – mattered enormously. It was the moment HTG’s transformation was on public display, and it needed to reflect everything the business had become.

Meaningful recognition

The Queen’s Award for Enterprise doesn’t come easily. Earning it required HTG to demonstrate genuine innovation and international commercial success – and being able to articulate that story clearly was part of what made the application compelling.

Apprenticeship scheme development and enhanced recruitment campaigns, meanwhile, improved candidate quality significantly and earned the CEO and Head of Innovation honorary doctorates. In a sector where engineering talent is fiercely competed for, being seen as a business worth joining is a genuine competitive advantage.

£50m+

2.5 x multiplier
– culminating in a successful exit
to Avingtrans PLC

The results

Revenue growth: HTG grew into a £50M+ group during the engagement – 2.5 x multiplier increase – culminating in a successful exit to Avingtrans PLC

Lead generation: 24% increase in leads within 12 months of implementing the new communications and marketing systems

Sales performance: Reduced sales cycle times across key markets through improved bid documents and structured customer engagement

Service revenue: New income streams developed through the Peter Brotherhood service model and installed base reconnection

Recognition: Queen’s Award for Enterprise; multiple industry awards from The Manufacturer and Siemens; Royal opening of the Centre of Excellence

Talent: Significant improvement in recruitment candidate quality; CEO and Head of Innovation awarded honorary doctorates

24%

increase in leads within 12 months

Why it worked – a few things are worth highlighting:

We went deep on discovery.
Talking to as many people as possible across a business – engineering, sales, operations, service – produces a lot of noise, but it also surfaces the things that nobody has thought to communicate. At HTG, that included patents, project stories, and operational capabilities that were genuinely impressive and completely invisible to the market.
We earned the expanded remit rather than claiming it.
Starting with sales collateral and growing into full global marketing operations over six years isn’t a sales strategy – it’s what happens when you deliver consistently and demonstrate that you understand the business thoroughly.

We treated the heritage as an asset, not a constraint.
Two centuries of engineering history, properly told, is one of the most powerful things a business can have. The challenge is making it feel like confidence rather than nostalgia – and that requires genuine understanding of what made the business great in the first place.
And we stayed flexible.
Over six years, HTG needed different things at different times: a brand rebuild, an acquisition integration, a Royal visit, a crisis communication, an investor relations programme. A rigid agency model doesn’t survive that. A genuine partnership does.

Traditionally, we were fairly disjointed – based on a factory type approach. So we posed RESOLVE the question of how can we improve that approach to the market, bring it together as a group offering and RESOLVE have really helped drive that in a consultative way across the group, presenting it coherently to the marketplace.

Marketing and communications in the traditional sense is world class. They communicated a fairly traditional industrial type product as a true solution into the market.

In addition to that, when you add in the other aspect, which is as a partner who you can consult on business strategy, how to grow the business and how to embed that thinking into everything you do, then that combined offering really does differentiate them from pretty much everybody else I’ve ever worked with in the marketing and communications industry.

Dr. Colin Elcoate

Chief Commercial Officer,
Hayward Tyler Group

HTG’s story is one of the engagements we’re most proud of – not just because of the growth, or the Royal visit, or the awards – but because of the end-to-end business transformation.

If your engineering business has more capability than the market is giving it credit for, we'd be glad to talk.

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Case Study:

How Hayward Tyler Group rediscovered its competitive edge

Hayward Tyler PLC had 200 years of engineering heritage, a global customer base, and genuine technical capability that most competitors couldn’t match. What they didn’t have was a way of making any of that visible in the market.

Over six years, RESOLVE became HTG’s global marketing operation – running brand, communications, sales enablement, digital, investor relations, recruitment campaigns, and supporting acquisition integration across the group.

The business grew from a struggling PLC into a £50M+ group that earned a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, had the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge open its new Centre of Excellence, and exited to Avingtrans PLC.

The situation HTG was in

How the relationship grew

Rebuilding the brand

Digital innovation – and how to talk about it

The proposal that changed things internally

Getting the operational story told

Building the service business

When the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited

Meaningful recognition

The results

Why it worked – a few things are worth highlighting:

We went deep on discovery.

We earned the expanded remit rather than claiming it.

We treated the heritage as an asset, not a constraint.

And we stayed flexible.

Dr. Colin Elcoate

Chief Commercial Officer,
Hayward Tyler Group

HTG’s story is one of the engagements we’re most proud of – not just because of the growth, or the Royal visit, or the awards – but because of the end-to-end business transformation.

Case Study:

How Hayward Tyler Group rediscovered its competitive edge

Hayward Tyler PLC had 200 years of engineering heritage, a global customer base, and genuine technical capability that most competitors couldn’t match. What they didn’t have was a way of making any of that visible in the market.

Over six years, RESOLVE became HTG’s global marketing operation – running brand, communications, sales enablement, digital, investor relations, recruitment campaigns, and supporting acquisition integration across the group.

The business grew from a struggling PLC into a £50M+ group that earned a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, had the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge open its new Centre of Excellence, and exited to Avingtrans PLC.

The situation HTG was in

How the relationship grew

Rebuilding the brand

Digital innovation – and how to talk about it

The proposal that changed things internally

Getting the operational story told

Building the service business

When the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited

Meaningful recognition

The results

Why it worked – a few things are worth highlighting:

Dr. Colin Elcoate

Chief Commercial Officer, Hayward Tyler Group

HTG’s story is one of the engagements we’re most proud of – not just because of the growth, or the Royal visit, or the awards – but because of the end-to-end business transformation.

Chief Commercial Officer,
Hayward Tyler Group