Enterprise Products

HighGrowth Profile

About the business Stamford-based Enterprise Products is the UK’s market leader in badge making machinery and manufactures millions of badge components and badges every year. It was established over 30 years ago on a foundation of service, quality and innovation – its most recent being an online service enabling customers to design their own badges in minutes which it’s currently preparing to launch. The company primarily supplies the education, charity, retail and leisure sectors.

Our growth journey so farI bought the company with my wife Philippa in 2007 when the previous owner was retiring and I had been made redundant. It was the first business we looked at but as an accountant and ex Finance Director I liked the look of it, despite the fact that it had been in gentle decline for a few years. We realised it was ideal as an online business and set up a website as soon as we took over.

The challengeFive years later, in 2012, we had grown the business by 75%, turnover had reached £450,000 and we were selling over five million badges a year for everything from election campaigns to pop concert tour memorabilia. After noticing increasing interest from overseas I decided to visit one of our biggest customers in Holland and this resulted in earning €70,000 a year from them. We realised building relationships with resellers in other European countries could lead to substantial growth – and that’s what we wanted. If we were to do this confidently though we needed to address an issue that was potentially a big threat to the business: being reliant on a Far East family business that manufactured our machines.

Getting the right adviceWe had been getting help from UK Trade & Investment to explore export potential in Europe when they recommended us to GrowthAccelerator. To me, the offer of reasonably priced expert advice to help us grow was a fantastic opportunity. Our Growth Coach Robin Singleton had experience of dealing with overseas manufacturers which was useful and encouraged us to think things through for ourselves. As an ideas person

Up from 4 people

to 6 people in 24 months

Jobs

Up from £450,000in 2012

Turnover

Andrew Vear, Managing Director

to £600,000 in 2014

With GrowthAccelerator you receive help from very experienced business people who have only your interests at heart and no agenda other than enabling you to succeed.

Ambition to grow the business by 100% within three years

Ambition

HighGrowth Profile

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who likes to solve things for myself this approach worked well for me. One of my biggest learnings was not to waste time and get distracted doing things that won’t make the business grow faster.

Implementing changeWe have made several significant changes to the business and are soon to make a much bigger one which will enable us to capitalise on the visits and contacts we’ve been making in Spain, Portugal, France and beyond.

We have taken on a full time engineering apprentice, a young student who used to work for us on a part time basis to repair our machines. He is helping us fulfil our ambition to bring their manufacture back to the UK. He has already prepared all the technical

drawings for manufacturers to use to give us costings. Even though the costs will be higher, having the ability to manufacture the machines here as well as import them will give us more control over quality and supply. This in turn will make us more confident selling in Europe. We’re working hard to make it happen very soon and are in the process of making an application to Grants for Growth, through the Manufacturing Advisory Service, which will help with the tooling costs.

We are already seeing sales in Spain start to grow and, using the formula we’ve developed to predict sales which says that for every 1 million people we can earn £4,000, we think we should do very well in our next target France – which has a population of 60 million.

What’s next for Enterprise Products?

The things we have done and discovered through our work with GrowthAccelerator have given us huge confidence in the potential of the business. By focusing on the activities that make growth happen we believe we will achieve the three-year 100% growth target we’ve set ourselves. As well as growing 10-15% a year in the UK, we are also expecting growth in existing markets like Holland, Belgium, Croatia and Sweden and plan to target Ireland, Austria, Lithuania, Hungary and North Africa.