28 LANCASHIRE BUSINESS DAY
Carole Garrett Continued from page 27
The biggest reaction was in our own team, people who joined the company because they like making videos and they like animating and dealing with people. Now they see that they’re with a business that listens to clients, looks at challenges and opportunities, and we come up with solutions. It just so happens we do it with lots of kit and cameras and animation. It is really exciting to know clients are coming to us not just because we make videos.
KI: Most of my work is around transforming places and it’s much bigger than any one organisation, it cuts across lots of organisations and so the approach is a little bit different.
It’s very much about collaboration, building consensus, bringing people along on a journey. You’ve got to be absolutely resolute about what you want to achieve and have absolutely dogged determination and tenacity to make things happen.
You’ve got to be willing to go and knock on doors and be quite forthright sometimes in what you say and maybe ruffle a few feathers, but also make sure you influence and you know all the right people.
One of the most complex things I ever worked on was the Todmorden Curve. We had to get the buy-in of three different transport authorities, Network Rail, two different train companies. It took ten years to do that and have a business case for it.
You’ve got to be absolutely resolute about what you want
to achieve and have absolutely dogged determination and tenacity to make things happen
CG: I ran an aerospace factory in Burnley in the 1980s. We had to put a survival plan in place when one of the businesses we were involved in supplying got into trouble. We brainstormed all sorts of things in terms of product diversity. Eventually we manufactured tea and coffee pots.
They were a premium product and sold in Harrods but the scrap rate was something like 70 per cent because aerospace quality was applied to a teapot. Did it work? No, but it wasn’t a disaster because a lot of people within the factory learned different skills, about different markets and in terms of taking it as a positive, we survived that period.
Iain Round
NB: The college has transformed as an FE institution into apprenticeship provision over the past 10 or 12 years. We’ve had to invest heavily in machinery and in staff and that is a challenge. We now have to look at short skills programmes, develop them for additive manufacturing, robotics and automation. Businesses don’t want a two-year course. They want something short and sharp that gets the skills they can take back into the business.
RG: Being in the IT industry, every day’s a transformation to be fair. We share responsibility as an organisation to take our customers through transformational change. It is about being agile and always trying to be better. If we don’t believe in what we are doing, how can we make them believe in what they can do?
The automotive sector realised very quickly in the pandemic that when people couldn’t visit showrooms or depots It had to find new ways of doing things. That ranged from meeting and greeting the customer to informing them where jobs are up to, all the way to actually costing and finishing the process.
In response we developed something which has now won several awards. It is a full digitisation of the automotive process, where all the customer consultations are electronic, all communication is electronic, all the job parts which form your vehicle, history and everything else, is electronic, making information accessible to everybody via portals.
This is transformational for that industry, but it can see the benefits, which are very much around ESG, the cutting of the carbon footprint.
IR: As an accountancy business, we’re heavily reliant on our staff. We have more than 220 and within our industry at the moment it’s very competitive and there’s more work than people to do it.
So, we’ve heavily invested in our people in two ways. We’ve moved offices and changed the working environment for people. We’re now in an open plan office which has improved communication. We’ve also invested in new people.
But the biggest transformation is digital. We have set up a digital transformation team providing digital solutions to clients. We’ve started recruiting IT programmers.
What inspires you when it comes to the transformation challenge?
RH: One of our biggest clients is a billion-dollar recruitment company down in London. They’ve been with us since 2008 and they are in 20 offices around the world. The CEO there is amazing to talk to. He’s got nearly 3,000 people and he’s dealing with Microsoft and Amazon and Salesforce, but one of the last things he said to me was, ‘The problems
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