We speak to Dave Overman, GTC Electricity Networks director, about his fascinating career path and what the future may hold.
Do you want to start off by telling us a bit about yourself and your role at GTC?
I run the electricity business – operations, asset management, supporting our sales and adoption teams, basically anyone that wants to connect to our network, or support anyone that is connected to our network on the electricity side. That also includes our sister company Metropolitan, which owns and manages our heat networks. We’re doing a lot of work with them because clearly there’s a lot of electricity going on in that area, thanks to the Future Homes Standard and the requirement for low-carbon heating. Anything that’s got the electricity badge on it, we get involved. We work across mainland England, Scotland and Wales.
Is there such a thing as a typical week for you?
I’ll be talking to the upstream network operators and their directors or heads of to make sure that they’re supporting us by allowing us to work on their networks and design connection options, that ensure the best possible service for our customers while minimising cost. I’ll be talking to our sales team to help them come up with ways of connecting that facilitate whatever’s available in terms of load or other constraints, be it getting under railways or under canals, or whatever else might come along.
I work with the teams in terms of asset management, asset maintenance, just making sure that we’re working to budget, and that we’re getting the best out of our growing teams. I help with support and development, and we now have about 130 people within the electricity business.
Can you take us back to the very first step in your career?
I left school at 16. My father had been made redundant, things were tight, and my brother was going to university, and I thought, maybe I don’t want to be another drain, so perhaps I need to go out and get a job. I applied for numerous apprenticeships. At the time, at Stevenage College, on Monday it was water, British Gas on Tuesday, electricity on Wednesday, British Aerospace on Thursday and ICL on Friday.
My uncle worked for the electricity company and said ‘Come and join us’. I got offered a job from British Gas, even though I didn’t even attend on the day for the apprenticeship. I don’t quite know how that happened, but a job pack turned up to say congratulations! But I also got a job pack from Eastern Electricity at the time, and I decided that that would be the route to take. So, I joined at 16 for a four-year apprenticeship, then became an electrical fitter.
I don’t think I particularly had a career path, but I knew I wanted to do more. Every time I started working with someone, I’d go ‘I’m sure I could do that job’. I went back to college and did my degree, my MBA, and moved up. I did pretty much everything on the distribution network: maintenance, faults, construction, overhead line work, underground work, then design, and then asset management work – sort of ticked all the boxes and had 22 very good years there.
I got a phone call from this chap, Michael Powell, at Fusion Provida, and he said, ‘Oh, could you come up and have a chat with us? We’d love to meet you.’ They commissioned me to do some work, and I came back with a report for them, and they said, ‘We want to get involved, but we haven’t got anyone to do it – could you join us and set this business up?’ So, I set up their electricity material distribution business and ran it for a couple of years, got it up to about £1million turnover. They’re based in Chesterfield, I’m in Suffolk, so it was a 187 miles door-to-door.
Then I went and worked at McNicholas Construction, we did a lot of contracting work – the Gherkin was one of the first contestable connections that we did.
Then in early 2006, out of the blue, my wife saw an advert in the paper from GTC, looking for an electrical engineer. I had no idea why a gas company would want an electrical engineer, but I came for the interview. I was about the only person that they saw who had any idea about competition and connections, and what that market looked like. So, I joined, and it’s now two miles door-to-door!
Is there something you consider a highlight or would you think all these things are equally important steps on your career journey?
One of the things I take great pride in is the fact that we’ve got to one million connected customers at GTC. 20 years ago, the business had no connections, so that’s a phenomenal achievement. Our team has grown as well. We’ve got some fantastic people coming up who will hopefully take over in time and take more work away from me. They’ve come in as trainees, graduates or temps – we’ve had temps become senior people here. It’s just really lovely to see how they’ve grown, and the business has grown as well.
Is training and personal development a part of GTC’s philosophy?
Absolutely, yes. One thing that we’ve found over the years is that it can be difficult to bring talented staff in, so we end up growing and developing them as well. I think that is a really important part of our business. We do bring people in from time to time, there are a lot of people in the business who have started at quite junior levels and have developed. There’s probably only one person in my control team of 12 who’s not been homegrown. It’s really, really important to us to give people that opportunity. We’ve got some amazing people who have grown in terms of engineering.
How much do you personally deal with housebuilders and has it changed much over the last few years?
We spend a lot of time talking to our housebuilder customers to understand the challenges they are facing and then work up the best possible options for their schemes. I think the ethos of builders is, and always has been, very much, ‘I’ve got some land, I want to build, and I want people to buy the houses and be proud of living in those houses.’ I don’t think that side of it has really changed.
From our point of view, we work hard to support them with our multi-utility offering, including: electricity, water, wastewater, gas, fibre and crucially the transition low carbon heat solutions and how these support the wider electricity landscape.
Is it mainly the nationals that you work with?
We tend to work with something like the top 300, so it’s not just the nationals, it’s also the regionals. In terms of our electricity network, I think our biggest number of connections for one site is 3,500 and we have over 14,000 separate networks across the UK, totalling over one million connections.
Do you think technology is going to become far more mainstream and fundamentally change the way that you work and what skills GTC might require in the future?
Very much. We’re looking at a lot of these areas, particularly around assessing network load growth and what’s happening, particularly with EV cars and PV batteries, etc, all going on to the network. Our next phase is to start talking to the suppliers about what they offer in terms of tariffs at certain times that allow us to manage and balance our networks properly.
We do a lot of data processing. We want to be more inquisitive about what that data is telling us. Understanding what’s happening on the networks and what we can do to actually manage it is going to be our next big challenge.
