24 BIG INTERVIEW
Continued from Page 22
“It was quite a challenge but it was an opportunity and it felt the right thing to do. I didn’t tell my family about the deal until I’d done it. It was a shock to everyone, apart from me.”
The deal left her owning one of the leading providers of racking, shelving, archive storage solutions and partitioning, mezzanines, and material handling equipment.
Brysdales helps companies to maximise their workspace by designing storage systems to meet their specific needs.
Its extensive product range includes office shelving, pallet racking, office and industrial partitioning, conveyors and ancillary equipment.
The business has just completed its latest £10m project and Elizabeth explains: “We create space to help customers with their logistics and storage problems
“It is all about making things work for the customer – making better use of their existing space.”
That brings her on to the latest development, ‘The Effi Centre’, a £350,000 investment to create a working storage facility at its headquarters on the outskirts of Chorley that will showcase how businesses can make robotics work for them.
A new arm of the business, Brysdales Intralogistics has been set up and specialist engineers have been hard at work on the project, set to be unveiled in the new year.
Elizabeth, 59, says: “We’re creating something
businesses that don’t have £100m to spend but need to do something different.”
Elizabeth is also executive chair of The SEMA Approved Members Group, launched in September 2011 to bring together distributor suppliers of the storage industry. It is dedicated to raising industry quality and safety standards.
She is the first female to hold the role and very often she finds herself the only woman in the room. She says: “It is a very male-oriented
I came up through the ranks and if there’s a really big decision to be made I’m not afraid to ask a question
so people can see how robotics works and how they can apply it to their business. People need to see it to understand it. I’m very much a visual learner.
“It is a massively exciting project and no-one is doing it to this level. It is a massive leap into the future for us.
“Our target audience is the SME environment,
sector. But to me business is business and if you can do a good job, it doesn’t matter who you are.
“I came up through the ranks. And if there’s a really big decision to be made, I’m not afraid to ask a question. You can often see the relief on the faces of the guys around the table who also didn’t understand, but didn’t want to ask.”
Elizabeth adds: “People accept me for who I am, I don’t think people treat me differently because I’m a woman. I wouldn’t stand for that.
“I’m very determined, sometimes I have to ask myself, ‘am I determined in the right way?’”
When she took over the business it didn’t have a business plan. She says: “I knew how the business worked, the question I started to ask was, ‘could it work better?’
“We needed people to grow so we started to recruit. I’m good at finding the right people and at looking after people. One of the things I pride myself on is my background in HR.
“I wouldn’t be here without the people who work with me, it is all about the team. They work really hard. My job is facilitating everyone to be the best that they can be.”
A major multi-million pound two-year contract with an international sports fan gear business Fanatics gave the company the liquidity to further invest and grow.
“It gave us the opportunity to get to the next level,” she says. “You need cash to grow and you have got to keep reinvesting, that’s something I’ve always believed in.”
Elizabeth and the business have also benefitted from the Boost scale-up programme. This financial year it is looking at 20 per cent year- on-year growth.
Since she took control of the business she has grown its workforce from 14 to 55, with more new recruits on the way in 2025. Its impressive client list includes blue-chip companies and household names.
Today two of her children, Daniel and Charlotte, also work in the business. Will they take over eventually? She says: “I don’t know if they’ll keep it in the family, they have the opportunity. It’s their choice but I’ve got a few more years in me yet.”
Robotics in action
Looking back at the last three decades, she says: “I’m proud of what I’ve done. If I looked round and asked ‘how did this happen?’ I’d frighten myself.”
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