52 roundtable: building on success ... continued from previous page
Westcoast Group employs 800 people, with 500 in its wholesaling divisions based in Theale and Milton Keynes, Alex Tatham explained. “Actually our company tagline is ‘We are passionate about distribution.’ It is our only value and those with that passion are the people I want to employ, and it’s the value we want throughout the business.”
ingredient. The average age of his employees is mid 20s. There is no pre-requisite to play golf, but the company tended to attract people who are passionate about the game. “Growing our own has been part of our formula.” Every year the company takes in 25 one-year placement students from UK universities and colleges, and on graduation offers around five full-time positions. “We call it our academy model, and it’s something that very much works, allowing you to discover team players, hard grafters and so on.”
Grant Thornton’s Bob Alsop added that success was often dependent upon having a strong management team that kept a good view of its market, and was agile and innovative.
The warm glow of work
Murray suggested that making a company a great place to work was also a key necessity today.
John Wilkinson
“Our internal communications and the ‘feeling that we are all in this together’ are therefore very important. We tend to compete with vast American organisations listed on Nasdaq but they are very much mass production businesses and we are very much a mass customisation business. So we flex our business according to what our customers want us to do.” Despite being a £1.2 billion turnover company, Westcoast remains a ‘small’, nimble business able to react and adapt, says Tatham, “The key ingredient for our success is that we have driven a customer focus within our business.”
Neil Grundon highlighted the people in his company. “We are a well established family business, and our people and their industry knowledge have grown with us, and so we benefit from a low staff turnover.
“When we do recruit, we usually do so from outside the industry. In that way we gain fresh thoughts and don’t repeat old practices or industry mistakes.”
While bemoaning the lack of engineers at present, Grundon added: “We would like to recruit more from the people who create the rubbish in the first place – the designers in fmcg and packaging industries – so that we can better understand how to process those products back into the supply chain to achieve a circular economy.”
Other ingredients of success for us have been innovation and a desire for continuous improvement. “In our business one bin is very much like another, but if we can tell the story to the customer about what happens to our bin after it gets picked up, it gives us a lot more credibility.”
Golfbreaks boss Andrew Stanley, revealed that his people too were the success
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Jones agreed. “Sometimes things come by design and sometimes by experience in the job.” In founding CH&CO, he and his wife Robyn had quickly discovered the slim divide between home and worklife. “So we had to make the worklife a good environment or things weren’t good at home. Accordingly, as a family business, our team had to feel part of that happy family. That objective really has been a massive ingredient in our success. There is a lovely warm glow to achieving that within your business.”
“You get so much more from your team if they feel part of the business, particularly when you have success and they can share in that or in poor times like during the recent recession, they are likely to be far more understanding of difficult decisions.”
Lawyer Sue Dowling pointed out that although employment laws constantly change, “…time and time again when you are asked to advise on an employment situation which has got out of hand, there has always been a breakdown in communication, along the way.
“The whole culture of a business is fundamental because if you get this right from day one, you are much less likely to hit problems down the line.”
Along with good communication, Dowling suggested flexibility, moving with the times, and developing a happy dynamic workplace were success ingredients. “If you have a happy and friendly culture in your company, then business can flow from that too, because customers work with people they like and who clearly enjoy what they do.
Andrew Stanley
“Training of staff is also really important in business.” She revealed that Blandy & Blandy invest heavily in trainee solicitors. “Some Thames Valley legal firms have stopped doing that (perhaps employing paralegals or temporary staff instead). We think this is short-sighted. If you train people correctly in the first place, then people stay and move up through the ranks developing your business, along with their careers.”
Murray queried if upskilling of managers was necessary nowadays. Tatham noted that as a culture, Westcoast encouraged managers to “manage underneath their people, rather than above them”, providing support and acknowledging that poor performance could be as much poor management as the fault of an individual.
Tim Jones
Bloxham added: “When it comes down to it, although companies are looking for the skills, workers are looking for the right fit for their career and their life, and asking what this extended family in their workplace can provide. Having a ‘great place to work’ culture is important, and makes a huge difference for prospective employees. If a business gets the feel of the interview and, subsequently, the first three months of employment right, they often have the person’s heart.”
“We don’t spend a lot of time training managers by sending them away on courses. There is a lot of training gets done in the business, however. Mostly it’s on the job or through our IT vendors such as Apple, HP and Microsoft, and we even train our customers. So, it is a vital part of our business generally, but individuals feeling that they are a valued part of the business is the most important aspect to achieve.”
Survival through the downturn …
Murray wondered how businesses had THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – NOVEMBER 2013
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