Showcases / DITT looking at the future while celebrating 50 years in business
WHEN FOUR tradesmen joined forces to manage a large roofing contract for houses being built in Mossbank at the height of the oil boom in 1974 no one could foresee that the foundations were laid for one of Shetland’s most highly regarded building firms.
Fifty years later DITT has built around 1,000 houses for the private and public sector across the isles as well as many well-known public buildings.
And this weekend, the company has invited employees – current and previous, including the four company founders Larry Dalziel, George Inkster, John Tulloch and Robbie Tait – for a social event at the Lerwick Legion to celebrate reaching the milestone.
Earlier this year DITT completed the transfer of the company’s entire shareholding to an Employee Ownership Trust to enable current directors to retire while securing the future of the business.
Described as a ‘hands-on company with directors in boilersuits’, the new business model reinforces the positive culture which has always been one of DITT’s most distinctive trademarks.
Managing director Peter Tait, who is going to retire from his post at the end of the year, said the company was reinventing itself every 25 years, referring to his own involvement in a management buy-out in 1999.
“We have been described as strategically significant for the local economy by Highland and Islands Enterprise, and I think that sums us up: we are the largest construction company in Shetland, we have survived through 50 years,” Tait says.
“Many companies have come and gone in that time, but we are still here; thriving and still progressing, and with a new management that will drive the company forward.
“The original founders retired in 1999, and now through another 25 years before we transferred to ownership by employee trust, and that will us looking ahead to the next 25 years.”
The partnership became a limited company back in 1982 to allow the four partners whose surnames read as DITT to tender for larger contracts such as building the Montfield Hospital.
This was followed by other large contracts: the Clickimin pool and bowls hall, the fisheries college in Scalloway, the sizeable extension to Shetland Catch and the Shetland Museum and Archives in the early 2000s, followed by Mareel and more recently Eric Gray @ Seafield.
There are dozens more that could be mentioned such as the Unst Care Centre, the OT Centre at Gremista, Scalloway Junior High School, Foula School, the Brae Co-op as well as enabling work at SaxaVord Spaceport.
Photo: Dave Donaldson
But house building has also always been a major part of DITT’s portfolio, initially with the council and since 2012 mainly in cooperation with Hjaltland Housing Association. The company is currently in the process of completing the rebuilding of eight council houses in the Sandveien estate.
And as a pro-active company DITT is not just waiting for the public sector to tender house building contracts, they are also taking projects such as phase one of the Heathery Park development in Gulberwick to their clients to make it happen.
Employing around 120 people, the company has also been involved in a number of major developments at Sullom Voe Terminal since 2008 and, last but not least, operates a busy shop at its main premises off the Grantfield roundabout.
The company also currently employs 10 apprentices, testament to its commitment towards building and renewing its workforce but also proof of the value of learning a trade.
Newly appointed director Liam Spence, the company’s project quantity surveyor, joined the company straight after university in 2013.
“At third year at university we got a one semester industrial placement which I did at DITT, from January to September 2012,” he recalls.
“At the end of it [managing director] Gibbie [Irvine] just said ‘when you finish up at uni give us a phone’. So, I went through my fourth year, came off the boat, phoned him up, and he said there were projects starting up, could you start on Monday.”
After working on a number of large projects, he got the chance of becoming a director of the company, an opportunity he says he “couldn’t turn down”.
“I always say to new apprentices that DITT has already a tremendous legacy, but if you work in the industry for another 40 years, you will be able to take your grandchildren for a drive around town and say: ‘I built this and I built that’”, Tait adds.
“It’s tremendous to have that history, and to be able to look forward to what is still to come.”
