A typical sub-contract machine-shop, started in 1994 with a secondhand machine by an engineer with a wardrobe full of ‘I’ve been made redundant’ t-shirts grows slowly-but-surely to a turnover of circa. £800k and a NPBT of mid-teens%. Good organic growth in the last couple of years from existing customers getting busier has funded recent investment in two new CNC machines, helping to keep productivity competitive. Their customers want components for specialist automotive, healthcare and sanitaryware products and have been loyal but, if the owners want to grow the business further, there’s plenty more to go at.

About a decade ago, the owner buys another business with an own-product (in a niche of the aftermarket automotive sector with, seemingly, some growth potential) so he can have some security from the vagaries of sub-contract life, only to find that the reputation of the company he’s bought is in poor shape or as he eloquently put it, he bought a ‘pig-in-a-poke’. Alongside protecting the ‘crown jewels’ of his sub-contract business, he’s been philanthropically rebuilding the product’s name and reputation in the marketplace. His wife has devoted a decade to nurturing it but it’s still ‘suckling from the mother’ and in a cleft stick regarding its future.

Now in his early sixties and, by his own admission, a bit weary and craving a quiet(er) life, we were invited to determine their options and to craft a strategy which will give him and his wife some freedom to devote time and energy to their hobbies and social lives, deliver a reduction in the aggro’ associated with employing an experienced, ageing and difficult-to-replace/recruit workforce, ensure the weakling product is fit enough to come off ‘life-support’ and provide a return on all their early mornings, late nights and weekends making sure that customers got their orders, on-time.

What are the options?

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