EO Stories: Baxendale – Our EO Story
The Baxi Partnership was founded by Philip Baxendale, and his values and his vision reflect the business we are today.
The business was founded in 1866 by Richard Baxendale as a family manufacturing and engineering business. The company made everything from street lights to railway trucks and ultimately became Europe’s leading manufacturer of heating boilers with the iconic Baxi Boiler.
The company was transferred into employee ownership by the Baxendale and Castleton families in 1983 with the creation of the Baxi Partnership Trust. The creation of the trust was the culmination of years of research by Philip and reflected the distillation of his thoughts based on the research and his extensive conversations with other leaders in the field of employee ownership.
Philip believed that innovation and reinvestment, which would benefit subsequent generations of employee owners, was essential to ensure that the business was stronger than when he joined it. The principles of share ownership and capital growth underpinned his thinking about giving a financial return to the current generation of owners whilst building stronger foundations for future employees.
The Trust Deed which Philip put so much care into writing specifically made future employees beneficiaries of the trust so that it was always clear that the company should not be run solely for the benefit of the current generation.
In 2000, having sold its manufacturing activities, the company developed into a capital fund and consultancy service called Baxi Partnership, specialising in supporting mutual and employee ownership, carrying on the vision of Philip Baxendale; and it is from this consultancy that Baxendale Employee Ownership was born.
In the same year, the original Trust Deed was strengthened and enshrined in perpetuity by The Baxi Partnership Trusts Act 2000. To our knowledge, we are the only employee-owned company in the UK whose formation and aims are underlined by an Act of Parliament created solely for that purpose.
At Baxendale Employee Ownership, our EO story and Philip Baxendale’s legacy provide both our vision and our purpose. We believe in employee ownership as a long term stable solution to ownership succession and we believe in the power of employees to make a difference.
Our support for other businesses to become independently employee owned sees many thousands of employees across the UK now benefiting from the opportunity to contribute to their companies as owners and to benefit from their rights of ownership in the way that works for them.
We are employee owners working together.