• • • EDITOR’S INTERVIEW • • • Shine a light
Mark Abbott, the managing director of Ansell Lighting, told Simon King that the business has doubled in the last six years
W
ith a wealth of experience in product marketing and management, Mark Abbott started his career straight after graduating from his BA Honours degree in business studies, marketing. During his time at university, he had a year-long work placement at a precision grinding company and was invited back to go to work for them as a product manager.
Mr Abbott said: “I learnt the ropes of product marketing there, and then I went to work for Hotpoint, where I looked after refrigeration and dishwashing, a £150 million category. “Product marketing there meant everything from product design, development, colour management, through to managing the factories, albeit with a factory director who was responsible, but I had to plan the factories, through to presenting all that to the major buyers.”
As a role and grounding, Mr Abbot said his time at Hotpoint was “absolutely tremendous”. He worked there for about three and a half years and then he was poached to work for retailer, Comet.
“I worked there for a couple of years, but felt I was better at manufacturing than I was at retail, and went back into manufacturing, working for Glen Dimplex on the home appliances side,” he added.
“I worked for Glen Dimplex for 15 years across various roles. I was looking for something different and along came Ansell Lighting.” Mr Abbott said that he wanted to run a business, rather than a division of a bigger company. He started at Ansell Lighting in January 2016, when the business had a turnover of around £50 million. It was acquired in 2014 by the Endo Lighting Corporation from the previous owners, Alan Nappin, Martin Prince and Michael Carson.
“Endo wanted to bring in a managing director who could run the business, which has quite a family feel to it, despite Endo being a listed business,” Mr Abbott said. “They wanted somebody to come in and bring some of that corporate feel but try and keep it as a family business. “Ansell needed to change some of its processes and be a bit more process orientated. I came in and it’s been great to be honest; it’s a lovely business that’s growing at phenomenal rates and has some absolutely fantastic people.” Mr Abbott said that during his tenure, he’s had the support of the previous owners. Mr Carson looks after customers in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Mr Abbott said: “When I met the former owners, for the first time in the first interview, I just really got on with them. They were, plain speaking,
passionate about the business even though it was sold, they still loved it.”
Looking at the business, Mr Abbott said that there are many positives to discuss. “We hold a huge amount of stock and we’ve always got stock available 99.95% of the time in terms of our measurements,” he said, “we do a good job even though the last two years have been challenging. “We test things properly before they come in and that is why the quality is good. The industry has changed quite a lot over the past number of years, and the introduction of LEDs has been a huge change. “When the products come in, we know there’s going to be stock, we know we’re going to get support and if things go wrong, we’re there to manage the fall. The team go out with the confidence. They all know what we’re about, it’s about making sure the customer gets what they want.”
When it comes to designing products, Mr Abbott said that this process starts about three years out. “We’ll look at what trends are happening, what’s happening in terms of requirements and specifications and requirements in terms of government certification in whichever countries we’re looking at,” he said. “We look at gaps in the market and what USP we can bring to that gap or what else can we do better than the competition if the market already exists. We use research to feed back into our internal design team for products; we can then come up with our own concepts and we’ll do some basic tooling examples.”
Ansell Lighting has a product council, both internally and externally. It talks to installers, electrical engineers, contractors and architects. “We rotate that over a three-year period,” he
said. “The luminaire lifecycle is now four or five years, but when I started, the lifecycle was probably five or six years – and now in some products, it’s less than 18/24 months, which for this market is pretty quick.”
Mr Abbott said that in all of Ansell’s manufacturing bases, it commissions the tooling, pays for the tooling, designs the products, and then tests them. “We test everything before it comes over on trials, and we also test again when it comes into our assembly or into the UK,” he said. “Although the key assembly might be done by Endo, or a third party commissioned manufacturer, it has to be done to our tooling,
12 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • FEBRUARY 2022
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
