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DEBATE HOT 100
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
WHEN THE HEAT IS ON
We gathered our panel to discuss the findings from our latest Hot 100 list and how businesses are meeting the challenges it highlights. With us were a pair of the businesses featured in this year’s league table of the county’s
most profitable SMEs, one that had outgrown the list, our compiler and our partner on this feature, Studio LWD, and we met at their Poulton-le-Fylde base. Our broad question was ‘what makes and keeps you profitable?’
Laura Weldon
James Varley
Khalid Saiffulah
We always say it’s more important for
us to retain the client than go out chasing new ones
Dean Rodgers
How are businesses changing their focus to adapt to the way the world is changing?
DR: Profit is always the bottom line. Measure profit before tax. Sales don’t necessarily lead to profit.
The Hot 100 list has changed massively over time. Every time you put it together something happens. There’s a war, Covid has happened, so it changes a lot but it’s always going up. Profit has dipped twice in the last 12 years but it’s always heading upwards.
Head count dipped a little bit last year. It’s dropped again massively this year. Profits have maintained, turnover has broadly maintained. Head count has reduced to support that profit.
VP: We’ve got a couple of strategic goals this year and it the first time the leadership team has come up with them. That’s because quite recently we’ve become an employee owned business.
The goals are to get things right first time and to put people before profit. The culture of the business is incredible. We’ve always put our clients at the heart of everything and that goes right throughout the business.
The Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) allows us to give back. So we share profits within the
business back to employees. We’ve just paid our first bonus to everybody. Everybody, regardless of role, gets exactly the same.
Everybody wants everybody to do well and to do better and for us to provide a great service so we can win more work.
JV: We specialise in the processing and recycling of ferrous and non-ferrous metals. We have a diverse customer base. We buy a lot of material off other merchants, car breakers, factories, the general public and the demolition sector.
We process the material and we export most of our ferrous material, mainly to the Indian market as well as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam. Some goes into the European market, Spain and Portugal.
The European market has been slow these last 12 months because of rising energy cost. Steel mills have low production; they’ve shut down.
So we’ve taken a step back and basically simplified our model, our strategy, reduced staff levels, reduced processing techniques and we’ve concentrated on one processing technique.
Basically we went backwards to go forward. We’ve lowered turnover, increased profits. We started focusing on contracts and jobs that were making money rather than chasing everything.
Victoria Pittman
KS: We manufacture hygiene paper products for hospitality, leisure, food, the healthcare industry. We have developed the business. It’s really focused on productivity and innovation and technology.
We’ve invested quite heavily from day one in terms of making sure that we can produce using the best quality machines.
We’re a high volume, low margin business. We need to have the capability to produce a lot of products. If we use toilet tissue as a reference, we produce about 1,700 toilet rolls a minute.
Covid had a serious impact on us as a business, we maintained our turnover but we dipped in profitability. But we used that time to refocus and reset.
Covid affected businesses quite differently but the ones who used that time to refocus and reset and get ready for the post-Covid environment and understand what that was going to look like were going to be successful going forward. That was my mantra at the time.
We built 60,000ft of warehousing space, put in a new production line in the middle of Covid. We’ve automated all our lines now from beginning to end. Our focus has been on the customer.
Our product needs to be with them and
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