Philip Baxendale set up the Baxi Partnership trust in 1983. He and his cousin sold their gas-boiler manufacturing company to the trust for only one tenth of its value - a massive gift to the employees.

Over the next 16 years the company grew to £200m sales and was highly productive and profitable. But in 1999 the company made a huge acquisition, a strategic mistake, and in 2000 the employees were forced to sell out.

£20m was left, which is what Baxi Partnership now uses to support other companies which want to fulfil Philip Baxendale's vision:

"...to ensure that the company continues forever to be employee owned and a professionally managed, dynamic, growing business which has regard always to the interests of its employees as people and as partners."