The company was featured as one of the best performing businesses in last year’s BDO Staffordshire Growth Barometer and has grown by 40% since 2015 with turnover reaching just over £20 million in 2017.
With four international offices plus its UK operations, the company employs 150 personnel globally. Around 60 percent of staff are located in the UK at Fradley Park, which houses a manufacturing innovation centre and a head office, both of which are the primary focus for the investment programme.
During the first phase of the investment, which was completed in 2017, the head office doubled in size to accommodate the growing number of sales, technical support and administration staff and the building was also completely remodelled to improve facilities. It now boasts six new meeting rooms, a spacious new reception area and washrooms, and car parking has also been increased by an additional 42 spaces.
Group Managing Director, Will Perkins, explained: “We’re part of the way through a planned business growth and investment plan which is already transforming the way we do business both in the UK and overseas markets. The next phase of investment, which has just started, is clearly focused on new product development, innovation and our UK manufacturing facilities.”
He added: “In addition to expanding and upgrading facilities at our Hood Innovation Centre, we’re also investing in digital technologies such as 3D printing for rapid prototyping systems and business intelligence platforms as well as increased in-house testing.
These technologies allow us to concept and verify our designs more effectively, giving us confidence in product performance whilst also facilitating a much quicker and risk free route to market.
Having Rapid Prototypes readily available combined with utilising our new testing facility allows us to validate new models in advance, from this we can increase efficiencies and reliability in finished product.
Business intelligence systems / platforms allow us to be more intuitive to global customer demands, facilitating an “easy to do business with” mentality whilst simultaneously fostering a “lean manufacturing” world class culture.
Clearly, this level of growth means that we are always keen to engage high quality people, so part of our £1 million investment will be directed toward new staff and growing our highly skilled team.”