Galen founder says that hiring the right people has helped his latest pharmaceutical venture to go from strength to strength, writes Carissa Casey

On the Monday morning after Sir Allen McClay retired from Galen, the pharmaceutical giant that he founded in 1968, he leased a small unit near his former company. The unit had no furniture, no electricity, no water and no phone line. Sir Allen was 69 and admits that he wasn't particularly sure what he planned to do.

Galen had launched on Nasdaq a year earlier, becoming Northern Ireland's first $1 billion company and netting him an estimated £300 million. Whatever the financial gain, the day to day experience afterwards left him increasingly dissatisfied.

"Post IPO is the most soul destroying thing for people who are trying to develop a company," he says.

"I would not preclude an IPO - they're necessary in some businesses. Why I'm against IPOs, particularly on the American market, is that they look at quarterly reports. If you grow a business according to a quarterly report, you're not concentrating on the future of the business.

"The financial boys come in and all they're interested in is earnings per share. In a lot of cases, management take the short-term approach to keep the shareholders happy and that is the wrong thing to do. I hated that. I'm not that type," he says.

"A business doesn't work on three-month cycles or even six months. In my opinion, a year is short enough."

The crunch time came soon after. Galen had bought the US marketing company Warner Chilcott and the emphasis shifted to the US market to the exclusion of the facility in Craigavon, where McClay had founded the firm.

"They [ the board of management] had lost interest in the people here - the people I'd bought into the company. I felt a responsibility to them. Because of their talents and what they'd done, we'd been successful.

"I'd absolutely no doubt they'd be put out. It hurt, to be honest. When you've known people and worked with people, that hurts."

So Sir Allen retired from what had once been his own company on Friday, September 30th, 2001, and went back to work the following Monday in an empty industrial unit.

"I had a mobile phone which is well ahead of what I had when I started Galen." He also had a sizeable bank account and what he describes as a "muddied vision".

Within a few months, he had bought back the first of four Galen business divisions he was to eventually purchase and which form the bulk of his new enterprise, Almac. Put simply, Almac provides a drug development service to large pharmaceuticals - everything from discovery, commercialisation, production and clinical trials.

Its work covers most serious therapeutic areas such as cancer, Aids and heart disease. It employs 1,100 people across five divisions in Craigavon and a further 800 in the US.

"Almac isn't gold standard, this is platinum standard," says McClay. "It's entirely different from the old Galen. It's a whole new world of innovation. We have five professors in the group and I'd venture to say even the big pharmas don't have that."

Almac has no venture capital involvement and carries little or no bank debt. McClay is its sole shareholder and, at 74, he plays an active role in the management of the company.

"I come in at 8 in the morning and stay until 6pm or half past. Time passes at a tremendous rate," he says.

"At my age, I don't want to be stuck in a corner waiting for breakfast to come and then waiting for the lunch to come. But everybody has a sell by date. I'd like to think that if I don't recognise it, other people would come forward and tell me it's time you shifted out of that chair."

There is little sign of that happening as yet. He has just returned from a business trip to the US and is planning another shortly. "I'm busier now than I was with Galen, that's what I can't understand.

"Maybe it takes me longer to do things, but it's a different feeling now. There's much more happening. There isn't a day in this place that there isn't some change going on," he says.

The youngest of six, McClay claims he only studied pharmacy because he got paid during training. "I'd say I was the worst pharmacist in Northern Ireland. It was a stupid subject - it was a memory subject. You could teach a gorilla to do it," he says.

He worked for Glaxo for 13 years as a medical rep and admits that, despite being successful, he had a number of "altercations" with senior managers in the company.

"I was never a great man to be subject to formalities. I never got an ounce of promotion. I was never outside the top six in sales. I knew everyone in the hospitals, there was hardly a consultant I didn't know. It took me long enough to realise I wasn't going anywhere." Aged 36, he founded Galen (called after the Roman physicist and anatomist) by formulating four new products and having them manufactured. "It wasn't heavy formulation," he says.

As Galen was growing, he became involved in the retail sector, building Connors Chemists, at one time the largest such chain North and South of the border. He sold the shops to Boots in 1996.

"I don't like the word entrepreneur. It comes from the French and means to undertake. I think some of us want to blaze a new trail, get away from the mundane. I don't think people see a gap, I think they create a gap. The secret to success is getting the right people around you."

People seem to be McClay's biggest motivation. Money doesn't seem to be high on his list of priorities, despite the financial rewards his hard work gives him. He drives an 11-year old car - "it goes like a Swiss watch and gets me from A to B" - and struggles to name his biggest material extravagance.

An overflowing car park at the Craigavon facility seems to matter more. "I know all these people are working, they're paying their mortgages, their kids are getting an education, they're going on holidays. That's a tremendous feeling," he says.

The atmosphere at Craigavon is as close to a well-heeled university campus as it is to an industrial facility and McClay is proud of the atmosphere he has helped to create.

"I have visited dozens of companies and going into them I could nearly tell you from talking to the girl at the desk what they're going to be like. There's an attitude and it filters down from management.

"I've a firm belief in certain things. If you don't know your people, you'll never understand yourself. There's a terrible lot of people get a fanciful ego because people are telling them what they think they should be told."

As for the future of Almac, despite his financial involvement, he is adamant that it's not his decision. "I've told the people here that it's their company. I've selected first-class people. They'll make the decision and it will be a wise decision to benefit everybody. I'll not interfere."