Jacqui McLaughlin, CEO of workplace health risk technology specialist, Reactec
What is your business called?
Reactec Ltd.
Where is it based?
Edinburgh.
What does it produce/do?
We produce technology that allows real time monitoring of workers’ exposure to health and safety risks, with data analytics to help employers prevent degenerative and impactful health problems.
It’s possible to measure many of the risks in the workplace that cause irreversible harm that accumulates over time, significantly impacting quality of life.
This includes exposure to vibration that can lead to debilitating pain in the hands arms and back, exposure to noise that leads to hearing loss, and exposure to dust, which is a prime cause of lung disease.
Reactec delivers simple-to-use monitoring technology that measures an employee’s personal risk levels, giving them real time alerts to manage their risk, at the same time providing employers with intelligent analytics of the employee and workplace risk profile to create safer working environments by design.
To whom does it sell?
This is a business-to-business proposition and we operate in a range of sectors: construction, local authority, rail, manufacturing and any number of employers from small SMEs to large corporates
What is its turnover and how many employees does it have?
£5 million and 37.
Why did you take the plunge?
I wanted to be able to make a difference in a technology-led SME.
What were you doing before?
Senior business leadership role responsible for P&L and business strategy for a £65m business unit within Smiths Group PLC.
What do you least enjoy?
Dealing with legal matters.
Contract terms and conditions and measures to prevent unethical exploitation of a company’s intellectual property are a necessary evil in business. However, the legal profession and big corporates do not consider the needs of SMEs who have a valuable offering to big corporates.
It is wasteful cost to review and comply with a big corporate’s terms that are disproportionate relative to the service offered, often slowing, if not blocking, access to goods and services that will benefit the big corporate.
What do you consider to be the main successes of the business?
Transforming a traditionally capex sale into a service plan proposition where customers really value the intelligence from our data analytics as opposed to purely our measurement technology.
When I joined the business, we had a single monitoring technology with data analysed on third party’s PC based software.
Today we have an ecosystem of workplace wearables and cloud-based analytics that work in harmony to create actionable intelligence that is creating safer work environments for our clients’ people from four different common risk agents.
We know our clients see the value of the service provided by our data analytics with over 50% now preferring service plan packages over capital hardware purchases.
What are your ambitions for the firm?
To generate as many sales internationally as we do within the UK. Historically, we have been trapped within the UK where attention to workplace health and safety is the best in the world. However, the risks we help employers manage are life impacting and evident across the world.
Attitudes to health and safety are improving, with Australia and Europe now not far behind the UK and with North America catching up.
We were recently invited to attend a congress in the US sponsored by Amazon on musculoskeletal disorders as experts in the human response to vibration. Large ethical corporates are considering more and more what causes harm in the workplace.
What single thing would most help?
Employers who are more concerned about employees’ welfare than legal compliance. Employers who take actions to comply with legislation around workplace health and safety seldom do enough.
Legislation demands an assessment of risks and the introduction of control measures to control risk. However, legislation is generally decades behind the capabilities of technology and does not therefore promote what is possible in today’s technology.
Today we can dynamically measure risks in real time and implement control measures that are validated by real, demonstrative improvement. This is a radical advancement on assessments and generic controls.
What is the most valuable lesson you have learned?
Being back in the SME world after a large plc, we can be so much more dynamic in everything we do, in particular speed to market. I was blown away by how we were able to react to the pandemic.
My initial thoughts were we would not survive, given the country was going into lockdown and our offering required people to be at workplaces.
However, within three months of lockdown we pivoted our technology to provide a social distancing tool, survived and escalated our technology roadmap to the point where today we can provide warnings from moving hazards in heavy industry, which paved the way for Reactec to realise a 53% growth in orders last year with our new offering.
What was your best moment?
Managing the business through the Covid pandemic.
What phrase or quotation has inspired you the most?
Better to be approximately right than exactly wrong!” has been a guiding principle throughout my time with Reactec.
I have become quite evangelical in educating traditionalists from health and safety on the virtues of large data sets of approximate realistic data over somewhat scientific, but very limited, spot risk assessments. Many other professions understand the value of data – H&S is still on a journey to adopt it.
What is the best book you have ever read? Why is it the best?
Mindstore by Jack Black. I attended a Jack Black talk in an early part of my career when transitioning from engineer to business manager and subsequently bought his book.
For a young female engineer in a man’s world it was truly inspirational and gave me the confidence to do what I wanted to do.
A childhood in the East End of Glasgow and an education and career path where you are very much in the minority did not result in someone whose confidence matched her ambition. Jack Black’s Mindstore helped change that.
How do you relax?
By going for long walks with my energetic cockapoo
Interview by Ian McConnell
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