ON THE TOPIC OF | MOTION CONTROL
PROBLEM-PPRROOFBELSESMIO-SOLVING SNOALLVING While his businesses may di er in terms of their
At rst glance, the motto of
LG Motion – ‘Put simply,
we make things that go
in and out, up and down,
round and round’ could sound
simplistic. However, it’s not only a
good description of the company’s
activities, it’s also symptomatic of the
company’s highly practical and downto
earth approach to problem-solving
– a philosophy that stems from its
owner, Gary Livingstone.
Explaining the catchphrase, he
says: “Any industry we can go into
and we’ll be able to talk about their
problem and you can normally boil it
down to ‘So you want that bit to go up
and down?’”
Of course, arriving at the desired
result is not as easy as this might
make it sound, but Livingstone’s
background has more than
prepared him for this. He started an
apprenticeship with Time & Precision
at 16 and, when the company went out
of business in 2005, bought it from the
administrators and absorbed it within
LG Motion.
In this, he believes he was
technologies, Gary Livingstone ensures that certain
themes remain universal, as Paul Fanning discovers.
fortunate that
he pursued
what was then
a relatively new
discipline in
electro-mechanical
engineering. “The
fact that I went the electromechanical,
cross-disciplinary
route before it was fashionable
was certainly a big help,” he
says. “Really, electro-mechanical
engineering didn’t really hit the
UK until the early 80s. I was lucky
enough to get started in 1986, so I got
in at the earliest stages. However, it’s
more that it’s an area that interests me
and opens up a range of applications
and some of those applications are
fascinating.”
But LG Motion is not the only string
Livingstone has to his bow. He has two
other companies to his name: MiniTec
and Precision Acoustics. MiniTec,
which offers modular aluminium
pro les, came under his wing at
the suggestion of the company’s
German boss. Says Livingstone:
“Although Time & Precision had
been a distributor for MiniTec since
1991 and I knew the product, the only
words I’d ever exchanged with the
owner before that were ‘Do you have
milk and sugar?’ So, it was a bit of a
surprise when I got the phone call.”
This meant launching two
businesses at the same time.
However, that did mean he was
amortising the costs and locations
and reducing some of the risks.
“The two businesses have gone on
pursuing their own separate paths,”
he says. “They’ve got their own sets
of staff, their own markets; they do
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UK | JULY 2019
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