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Mika
Halttunen: My
father, Seppo Halttunen created the company with his partners in April 1969.
Few years later my parents bought out the investors, Halton became a family
company and has remained one till today. When my father started the company,
Halton was specialized in manufacturing equipment for supermarkets,
refrigeration products among others. My father was an entrepreneur with
manufacturing background, looking for new product ideas to manufacture. One
day, when building a new factory in his previous job, he saw air diffusers
being brought to the site, imported from Germany and England. He figured that
this may be a good product to manufacture in Finland. That’s how our
ventilation business started. During the past decades we split the company
between me and my brother. My family kept Halton and my brother the supermarket
refrigeration company under the name Pan-Oston. I became the sole owner of Halton
and invited Tarja and Krista, our oldest daughter as co-owners. Since 1997,
Halton has been exclusively specialised in indoor climate.
MH: My father started the first
international operation in 1978, he opened a factory in Canada. In the 1980’s,
we launched sales companies outside Finland. Today we are present in 35
countries and will add two more this year, ending up the country count at 37 in
2019. The USA is our largest single market, while Europe is about half of the
whole company. We have production in 9 countries, in Europe we manufacture in
Finland, England, France and Germany. Last week we inaugurated our second
factory in the USA, celebrating at the same time 30th
anniversary of Halton USA. Later this year, we’ll inaugurate our second factory
in China. We have been in China since 2005 and we’ve been able to make money
there, which is not always the case, as this is not an easy market. Our position
in certain segments is pretty good in the region. Halton has been in Asia since
the 1990’s. We started our operations in Malaysia, which probably made it
easier to go to China. Malaysia is one of the easiest and most attractive
countries to start business in the region. Everybody speaks English and the
country a is ethnically diverse with three major groups. We relied on our local
colleagues to settle in new markets. Our Indian colleague developed business in
India, a Chinese colleague started operations in China and trained local
people. Malaysia was the centre of our growth in Asia.
Tarja
Takki-Haltunen:
We are both HVAC engineers. Initially, I wanted to become a ship builder, because
my father was a director in a shipyard in Finland. I wanted to design big
ships. But in the early 1980’s the shipbuilding industry declined, and my
father told me this is not a good choice. I was already at the mechanical
engineering department, and I gave my father the book about available courses,
as I was not sure what to study if not shipbuilding. He looked at the courses
and said, well, this H-V-A-C probably works for system designers. This is how I
chose HVAC.
We studied
under Olli Seppänen’s supervision. At that time, Olli started teaching at the
University of Technology in Helsinki as a very energetic professor with
radically new ideas. He has changed everything in the education of the
university. We were in his first class, kind of his Guinee pigs. And the
experiment worked out very well, there were many successful people in our class
who then pursued excellent professional careers. We were two women with twenty
men in that first year.
MH: For me, studying HVAC engineering
was never a question. We met with Tarja at the university and graduated in
1988. Then we got married and went together to the USA to start our business
there. We stayed for 3 years. While expecting our first child, Krista, my
father told us that he considers retiring. We agreed that I will take over the
entire company as CEO. For this we had to return to Finland.
TTH: Mika became CEO at the age of 31,
very young if I think of it now. But then, we were young and thought why not?
Let’s do this.
MH: In our mission statement we talk
about enabling human well-being in demanding indoor environments. This is our
reason of existence. We believe that everyone has the right to a healthy indoor
climate.
A key to
success was that we aimed at finding niche areas from the beginning. Already my
father understood that HVAC is a big industry with major players from the US,
Japan, nowadays from China. Competing with them would be a mistake. Instead, we
seek niche areas that are difficult enough for smaller companies to compete,
and small enough that big companies are not interested in playing there. We
have been following this strategy from the start. We strongly believe in being
specialist in specific segments. Finland is a too small market for niche areas,
but if the market is global, there are no limits for growth. Excellence is
another core value at Halton. Our main goal is to become the experts to the
experts. Meaning that in these niche areas we want to be so good that we can
provide value to the best expert in the world in the field, so they ask
questions from us.
TTH: Customer-centricity is also our
core value. A good example is the health segment, where we sell directly to the
end-users. We built in our innovation hub in Kausala a real-scale, fully
functioning operation room. We invite surgeons and nurses to visit the
operation theatre where we perform simulated operations while measuring indoor
air quality. We test new clothing for doctors and demonstrate how their
occupational well-being evolves during an operation. We simulate the same
circumstances like during an operation, only without the patient. If you talk
to end users, your key customers, you can understand their real needs. Right
now, health is probably one of our most important growth engines. The segment
grew 70 % in 2018, it will grow 50% this year and the potential is huge. From
here, we can expand to the pharmaceutical industry and other related fields. In
Europe, most hospitals were built in the 1960’s and we expect a massive wave of
hospital construction and renovation in the coming years.
Simulated operations are carried out in Halton’s full-scale operating room at Halton Oy in Kausala.
TTH: Indoor climate and wellbeing is a
much more rounded subject than other fields. There are still many problems
people face regarding indoor climate, which we couldn’t solve. Just recently a
Finnish paper brought a controversial article about mould in buildings. Some
doctors claim that mould is not the real problem for health, as everybody
exposed to it develops antibodies in their immune systems, while only few of
them develop symptoms of respiratory diseases. I think that the article was
quite controversial, as it diminishes the users’ experience. Occupant
satisfaction and wellbeing should be much more appreciated. We shall measure
indoor climate performance based on the satisfaction and feedback of the people
using the building. Engineers like to measure everything with numerical
indicators and complicated formulas. But at the end of the day what matters is
how people perceive the indoor environmental quality.
MH: And we must respect individual
differences and provide individual indoor climate. Technology should find
better ways to make sure that each person has a possibility to affect indoor
environment. This is the trend and the direction where we must go.
TTH: At a certain point of my career, I
left Halton to start a company called Indoorium. Our mission was to save people
in office buildings from deteriorated indoor environmental quality. We
localized the UC Berkeley occupant satisfaction survey first time for Finland,
which became a mainstream IEQ assessment tool. Those years I learned that if
more than 30% of the occupants complain about IEQ, there is always a technical
problem. And as the end-users were able to indicate the locations of their
workplaces it was easy to see that the complaints accumulated to certain floors
and zones. It became also obvious that our sector doesn’t care about its
customers as much as other industries. If in the car industry 30% of customers
wouldn’t be satisfied with a product, you could not sell that car. But in
buildings this is not a big deal. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to have
changed much in the past 20 years.
MH: In general, I see the market trends
in our industry optimistic. There are many drivers that create opportunities
for us, I see the future of our industry very positive. We focus on well-being.
What can be a more noble way to run a business than providing health and
well-being.
TTH: Climate change is the biggest
challenge we face. We must prevent and mitigate it. At the same time, we must
improve indoor climate in buildings, while the outdoor environmental conditions
are getting worse. This is the key challenge we must deal with. Energy
efficiency can have only limited impact. It may happen that we save energy but
deteriorate indoor environmental quality. And this, of course, we should never
do, because buildings are for people. If we can solve the dilemma of producing
CO2 free energy, then we can use the necessary amount of sustainable energy to
create better indoor climate.
MH: The starting point must always be
the building user who we serve. The definition of user-centred performance
criteria is of key importance. ICT and new technology may help, for instance we
can now measure, monitor and predict how systems operate. However, first we
must ensure that the basic components function as they should. Even in Finland,
where we believe that we know what we are doing, HVAC systems do not work
properly. Yesterday, we had an interesting discussion about demand-based ventilation
with Dr. Risto Kosonen, our former colleague, now a professor at Aalto
University. He found that in 8 of 9 buildings, demand-based ventilation was not
functioning properly. And now they talk about digitalisation and AI. But the
basic systems still do not operate as they should. And the systems can become
too complicated.
TTH: I agree. We must never start from
the technology, but from the customers’ need. Things will become more
complicated if you add more technology. Nowadays, for example, people start
valuing more natural ventilation. I don’t know if this is a threat, it can
certainly be a health hazard in urban environments, and we must be careful. If
systems get more and more complicated and the image of our industry is that
these complex systems never work, than customers will naturally favour simpler
technologies.
Halton
received a special REHVA award at the REHVA AM2019 Gala Dinner in Bucharest
commemorating their 50th anniversary and to thank the
company for their longstanding support
TTH: From 2013, we started to develop
strategically the health segment, I oversaw the process for 5 years. We
organised a business plan competition within Halton and the Board evaluated the
plan on the health segment as the best. We chose 4 specific spaces to focus on,
allocated resources and organised the work differently than before. Dr. Kim
Hagström, who has been working in the field for 10 years, was a key expert in
the process. Skanska, a major customer was constructing the Karolinska hospital
near Stockholm at the time, and we decided to develop an entirely new system
with them. We had the necessary knowledge and technologies to serve this
sector, still it was a big effort to build a whole new business segment. It
took 2 years to come out with new products. Today, we offer turn-key operating rooms with specialised ventilation solutions
for ultraclean operating environments called Halton Vita solutions.
The Halton
Vita OR Space solution for clean and ultraclean operating environments is based
on the controlled dilution principle, which provides the required air
cleanliness and recovery time for the whole operating space. In the controlled
dilution principle HEPA-filtered air is introduced into the room in a carefully
controlled manner, effectively displacing and diluting air impurities.
We realised
that our customers prefer the end-result delivered instead of dividing the
process in components. This was a learning curve for us. From a component
provider we became an integrator who coordinates all contractors in the
process. This is a paradigm shift, we are not a supplier like other companies
in this industry, but we sell the hospital owner 50 operating rooms as a
turn-key delivery. And this way you can guarantee the quality of the
end-result. The next phase may be that we will sell the operating room air as a
life-cycle service, which may change the whole industry. I believe, it is
possible to sell the clean air. And then you can guarantee the quality as a
life cycle service, which will make lower quality companies disappear from the
market. That’s why we talk about the end-result so much. We want to measure it
and sell it.
MH: Of course, REHVA’s mission is
appealing for us. Coming from a small country, we strongly believe in
international cooperation. Partnerships are natural with this background. Olli
Seppänen has been very important in sharpening the focus and scope of REHVA,
reaching towards a role like ASHRAE. In the US. The vision has been very good,
being a leading organisation to foster our industry in good ways. We had
several excellent experts who were involved in the work of REHVA. We hope, that
this direction continues, and this focus gets even sharper in the strategy.
I’ve been in the Board of Directors of Eurovent Association for three years
now. There, we also try to understand what’s going on in Europe for the future.
The American common market is so much simpler, and it is much easier for ASHRAE
to take a leading role there. Of course, it depends also on money. It is very
important that Eurovent and REHVA work together to make European industry
stronger. Especially now, if we consider how the geopolitical situation is
changing recently. We have lost the idea of free trade and markets. We go back
to closed blocks both geopolitically and economically. The walls are going up
again, we have China, Europe and USA as separate blocks. Coming from a small
country, we are for free trade, and this is not the trend in the coming decade.
Being part of the EU can help a lot in handling this situation. This is
essential for us.
TTH: Our daughter is also in the STEM
field, but we have never pushed her towards it. I think, the most important
thing is how fathers talk to their daughters about STEM areas, fathers can
encourage their daughters to follow. At least in my case, my inspiration was my
father. He was an engineer and I thought, this is cool. I want to do something
like that. Men should notice the big potential in female engineers and women in
tech and should promote women. In the company we should have plans on how to
drive the company towards more diversity and inclusion. Not only in terms of
gender, but all aspects, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on. In
diverse teams, the understanding of different possibilities is much better, and
the quality of decisions improve on the long term.
Also, we
should encourage women to take more executive positions. There is still this
prejudice that women become experts, while men oversee the business. It
shouldn’t be that way. Women are sometimes very cautious if they want to take
this path. We should encourage more women to take leadership roles, and then
the situation can change. Hopefully, I have been a role model in this family
company, but it can’t be just one person. We don’t have enough women in
executive roles. The United Nations’ “He for she” campaign is also relevant in
the building industry. People in power choose who to promote and whose careers
are enhanced. The people in power are still mostly men in our field.
MH: I’ve always loved music and started
to play guitar at 11, in Kausala. In 1975, we started a band, because my older
brother collected money for a school trip and organised a party and we were the
cheapest band around. This was our first show. The name of the band has changed
several times, and we were on and off during these years. After we made some
records in the 1980’s, everybody got occupied with their family and lives, we
were occasionally playing for ourselves. Twenty years ago, Halton was
celebrating 30 years’ anniversary and our sales manager in Finland had the idea
to organise a surprise performance at a customer party. We had three
performances for customers, and it was a blast. We wanted to continue and
played in small clubs in Finland. We played at the Healthy buildings conference
in 2000 invited by Olli Seppänen. Then the marketing teams of other countries
heard about it and invited us. The next concert was in the USA in 2001 when the
President of Halton USA organised a party for customers during an ASHRAE show.
Romania is the 17th country where the band
played.
Ärräpää
Orchestra playing at the REHVA Gala Dinner in Bucharest during the Annual
Meeting 2019.
Often, we
organise with our local sales departments shows as side events in small clubs,
like in 2008 after the Indoor Air Conference in Copenhagen. Last June we
celebrated Halton Japan 20-years, we played in a beautiful club in Tokyo. They
had a full recording gear installed, so we recorded the gig and released our
album Made in Japan, which we distributed during the show at the REHVA Gala
Dinner. If you did not receive a copy, you can find us on Spotify and YouTube.
We enjoy a lot these shows. I keep telling our marketing people, when it is
getting annoying, you must tell us, and we stop. Until now there are always new
countries to play in. People take life too serious many times, especially in
business. But you must have fun. Besides family, the most important part of our
life is work. While spending so much time at work, why don’t you have fun?
Don’t take everything so serious.
Tarja
Takki-Halttunen | Mika Halttunen |
·
Co-owner and Vice Chair of
Board in Halton Group ·
She has been serving Halton
Group in many executive roles: Director of New Ventures Business Area,
Director of Business Development Program, and Director of Logistics and
Information Systems ·
She founded Indoorium Oy
and was HVAC Consultant at EKONO Oy ·
She is Board and Executive
Committee member in Technology Industries of Finland, Board member in the
Confederation of Finnish Industries and in 3 technology start-up companies ·
Born in 1962 ·
Former volleyball and flute
player, likes golf, sailing, and knitting | ·
Owner and Chairman of Board
in Halton Group ·
He took over the company
form his father, Seppo in 1992 and became CEO and President of Halton Oy,
then CEO of Halton Group ·
He was conference President
of CLIMA2007 - Wellbeing Indoors, in Helsinki ·
He has held board positions
in many HVAC related associations in Finland and is Vice-President of
Eurovent Association ·
Born in 1960 ·
Plays blues & rock in
Ärräpää Orchestra and is Chairman of FC Lahti |
·
They both graduated as
engineers at the Helsinki University of Technology majoring in HVAC technologies
under Professor Olli Seppänen’s supervision ·
After graduation they
started together Halton’s Indoor Climate business in the USA ·
Tarja and Mika are married
since 1988 and have 3 children |
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