Manufacturing Growth Roundtable 2015

Tony Hughes, managing director, Hughes Safety Showers

We are the largest manufacturer of emergency safety showers in the world, and employ 100 people. We have overseas subsidiaries in the US, Canada, Germany, France, the Middle East and China, and we keep growing.

INNOVATION
We have an innovation policy and there are five points to it: products and services, processes, systems, culture and people, and business development. When you look at a business like ours, which looks at every aspect, there isn’t much left and innovation runs through all of those areas.

FUNDING
We have invested about £2.5m back into our business over the past three to four years. Probably a £1m has been invested in the past 18 months. We are a bit strapped for cash; I don’t deny it. The challenge with invoice finance is limitations over inter company loans, as we have a lot of subsidiaries, and also distributors. Funding hasn’t been a great issue in the recent past until the business really took off three to four months ago.

Tony Attard, chief executive, Panaz

We design, manufacture and distribute interior fabrics for three major markets: the leisure sector, hospitals, and corporates. We have 9,000 products and are very proud of our brand. Our current turnover is £15m and we employ 85 people.

INNOVATION
There is a mantra that goes through our business, which is innovate or terminate. Exporting is a great driver for innovation because you are travelling all over the world and talking to distributors and customers. They are all looking for different things, they have different ideas and you can bring those back. We are producing around 12 new collections a year, with 40 products each, and a lot of our growth is driven by this. What does it cost? It’s priceless, but it’s important to manage the innovation process using a stage-gating model.

FUNDING
Backing for textiles businesses from the Regional Growth Fund has been fantastic. We have given out £10m to northern companies who are investing in capital equipment. It has leveraged about £100m of further investment.

On a personal level, if you take the bank along the journey with you, they tend to be very receptive.

PRODUCTIVITY AND SKILLS
One of the things we did during the recession was to retain key people, so inevitably, when your sales go down your productivity falls in relation to that. We’ve got to grow the skill base, because as an industry, that is where we are going to have problems in the future.

Lesley Sharrock, commercial director, James Robertshaw

We are a manufacturer of commercial blinds, awnings and canopies. We service the hospitality industry, healthcare and education. We also service the trade nationwide and that is probably our biggest market sector at the moment. We have 24 staff and are hitting £2m turnover this year.

INNOVATION
We spend a lot of time innovating on our production processes. We have lots of creative thinking and it challenges the products we are manufacturing to see if we can make them in a different way to meet the client’s needs without taking them off the shelf.

FUNDING
The last three years we have secured profits for the business. Our bank at the moment is trying to throw money at us, and we were in ‘special measures’, so it has gone from one extreme to the other.

SKILLS
We’ve got an ageing workforce and until recently had no churn. We’ve just taken on three apprentices and three managers. This is exciting because we were reducing the workforce during recession. This now adds more energy in the business.

Cameron Javed, sales director, CoolKit

We take a standard commercial vehicle and convert it into a refrigerated vehicle. We also supply it in kit form and supply it around the world. We employ 40 people and turnover this year will be £7m.

INNOVATION
One of the things we realised is that the customer’s needs are ever changing, so we have to keep ahead of what is happening in the market. There is increasing regulation in our industry, so to convert a vehicle it has to be a certain standard. We have also innovated in the choice of materials to make it as light as possible, and always do customer research to help drive innovation forward.

FUNDING
We have driven profits back into the business and funded machinery and equipment purchases through asset finance. We have also had some Regional Growth Fund money as well for equipment.

Chris Lever, managing director, Bindatex

We specialise in the precision cutting of carbon fibre and composite tapes, predominantly for the automotive, aerospace and nuclear industries. We currently have five employees but are growing at 70 to 80 per cent a year.

INNOVATION
Without innovation we wouldn’t have grown. We worked with what is now Innovate UK, and we did proof of market study into the product we now manufacture. That opened so many doors for us, speaking to customers to see what the market needed. It took eight months to do that study and we found out exactly what would push the buttons of our customers when we offered that service.

FUNDING
We’ve invested in equipment through asset finance and support from the Regional Growth Fund. When we went to purchase the piece of equipment the cost was twice our turnover. But without it we couldn’t do the job. The day to day financing of the business is through overdraft and invoice discounting through companies like Market Invoice.

Peter Hammond, managing director, Auto Marine Cables

We are a second-generation family business and I am now the sole owner. We manufacture cables but face our customer as a distributor because we also supply all the electrical components. We are an £11m turnover business with about 70 employees.

INNOVATION
We are selling a commodity product, so we struggle for innovation there, but in terms of the processes in the company we have a structured, innovative policy. We feel if we focus on what the customer needs and the details of that we are in the game. Innovation is an investment because R&D tax credits have been used to return funding to the business.

FUNDING
We have been profitable for a long time and retained a lot of profit. When I bought my brother out we moved to invoice discounting, which has been fantastic. It’s simple, flexible. We have had 9 per cent growth this year. If you have got blue chip numbers lenders will chase you down; they were in a real bun fight by the time we had finished negotiations.

PRODUCTIVITY
It’s about that hunger to keep on improving and leave no stone unturned. Being in the automotive sector, people expect us to be fantastic and lean. We are good for an SME, but we are so far away from being whatever ‘world class’ means. Expose yourself to all these tools and techniques to help boost productivity, would be my advice

Amin Amiri, principal, A2E Venture Catalysts

We invest in or acquire industrial manufacturing businesses, and help them to grow and develop. We don’t have any timetable to sell, so are a friendly buyer in terms of keeping management and the ethos of company.

INNOVATION
A lot of innovation takes time to come to fruition, especially in the manufacturing sector; therefore we have to be extremely choosy when a business is on its knees, looking at areas that will pay back with quick results. Sometimes we deal with innovation by buying a competitor, which is an easy way to deal with ‘sluggishness’ towards innovation.

FUNDING
Funding is the biggest impediment to mid-market growth in the UK. It’s not the same in Germany or the US, where there are thousands of banks. In Germany you have industrial companies who are providing funds to their own supply chain. None of that happens in the UK. Also you have a lot of families who will do that. More businesses go bust coming out of recession and I cannot understand how the big UK banks deal with this. The innovation will come, I think, from companies issuing corporate bonds.

TECHNOLOGY
The advent of technology and advancements of production, with access to companies and suppliers via the internet, a medium-sized company could compete with any size business worldwide. That has never been the case before in history