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028 REPORTER


Below Bisley’s London showroom, featuring its new collections designed during lockdown


Right Richard Costin was appointed Bisley’s CEO on the eve of the pandemic


PROFILE Richard Costin


Richard Costin took over as CEO of Bisley at a tumultuous time – the start of the pandemic. He tells us about the challenges and opportunities the last year has presented for the company


WORDS BY SOPHIE TOLHURST


IT GOES WITHOUT saying that early 2020 was a different time to start a new job: coming in with plans and objectives, only to find the landscape drastically altered as the realities of the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent. For Richard Costin, installed as CEO of Bisley in February of last year, the first signals that something was up came from the factory floor: ‘Some of our staff started to receive text messages from the NHS saying, “Go home”. And it scared us, it scared the business.’ Amid the uncertainty around the


government’s plans to support businesses and workers, Costin tried to assess the situation. ‘I spoke to some of our competitors, spoke to the wider market, and people from a PR perspective [would ask] “What are your customers doing?”’ The reactions were mixed, Costin explains, ‘But we decided the best thing to do was to close the factory, and that’s a hard decision to take.’ The decision was particularly dificult for a business as international as Bisley, which has extensive subsidiaries across the world, and works with markets that were affected at different times by the pandemic. ‘The US was very different... they didn’t stop. And all of a sudden, we’ve got a factory that is closed, so our orders just kept building and building,’ Costin explains. Prior to Bisley, the new CEO had experience


in related businesses: starting off with Banner, a large ofice supplies company ‘selling everything from stationary to computer consumables to ofice furniture’. He later


had his own consultancy business, named Power Base Solutions, with clients such as Amazon, Staples, BHS – and also Bisley. Following some successful projects, during which Costin helped Bisley win some public sector business, he was invited back to work more with the company’s teams. Although Costin ‘thoroughly enjoyed’


working for himself, when Bisley’s chairman, Tony Brown, asked him to join as commercial director in 2019, he was glad to accept the offer. Costin describes Brown as ‘a remarkable individual, an absolutely charming gentleman’, who considers his business his family, and has breakfast with factory workers in the staff canteen rather than eating with other members of management. Costin says his remit, from a business


development perspective, was to ‘have a good look at Bisley. Going back over the last ten years, it hasn’t made money. And not because it has done anything wrong, materially.’ Costin’s experience in the public sector – with its specific way of writing tenders and bureaucratic processes – has also been a valuable tool for Bisley, and so, when the previous CEO, John Atkin, stepped down, Costin was promoted to fill the role – but then came the pandemic. Throughout this dificult period, Bisley’s management tried to be as clear as possible with staff, writing letters to their home addresses every two weeks, giving presentations on what was happening, as well as arranging things like Zoom quizzes and more – ‘to try and keep as many people as motivated as possible,’ Costin says. Speaking to customers and manufacturers, many were predicting business shrinkage of up to 50%, while Bisley itself estimated a 30% reduction for the period. Costin admits sadly that it was necessary to restructure the business at all levels and some staff were let go.


After the initial shock and closure, it was


able to reopen the factory after eight days with new safety measures. ‘We wrote to [the factory staff] and said, “Are you prepared to come back?” Costin explains, ‘because we weren’t going to force anybody.’ The company worked on its orders slowly, not wanting to burn through the order book until the future was more certain.


In pacing the restart of manufacturing, it


also freed up time for Bisley to try things a bit differently. ‘What innovations can we do? How can we act as entrepreneurs?’ Costin recalls. Things were certainly different: while


some markets – North America, Germany, were thriving, others had gone quiet. The UK was quiet as a whole, but the public sector had been spending, with essential government refurbishments under way. The most notable shift was to Bisley’s online consumer business – which usually brought in £3,000 a month. ‘Now we’re doing 15 times greater than what we started off with,’ Costin effuses. ‘Black Friday week, we did for the month… around £75–80,000.’ These changes necessitated different


marketing, customer services and even new


DAVE PARKER PHOTOGRAPHY


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