Overcoming people problems is key to business growth

STAFF development is among the biggest challenges faced by management teams aiming to grow their business, say North West executives.

Greg Hewitt, managing director at Warrington motor lubricant maker Rock Oil, believes evolving the roles of employees to reflect an expanding commercial culture can be tough.  

“When you are developing quickly, you can outgrow your staff,” said Hewitt. “You can have very good people working for you who were great at ‘level x’, but then you need to get to a new level and it can become quite hard when you have a relationship and they’ve done great work, but they aren’t right anymore because the job has changed.”  

Hewitt was speaking at an Investing to Grow event, staged by Barclays Bank at the Hotel Titanic in Liverpool.  

The audience of business leaders also heard about staff development and business growth issues from Mark Cartwright, managing director at Altrincham commercial vehicle trailer manufacturer Cartwright Group.

“I had to change the culture to grow the business,” said Cartwright. “I had to bring people on to take control and take responsibility for decisions. I had to make sure they understood what was required of them when we were operating at 20% or 30% greater capacity than before.”

Amanda Pitcher, managing director at Speke pharmaceutical equipment manufacturer Powder Systems, believes accessing specialist skills is her biggest issue as her business sells up to 95% of its product into more than 25 countries.  

“Normally we would go through apprenticeships schemes, or graduate trainee programmes, but we have undergone very quick growth in the last two years and there hasn’t been the time to do that, or get people through the system,” said Pitcher. “I have found it quite difficult to recruit specialist engineering resource while at the same time managing the growth of the company.”

A very different challenge was faced by Mike Moran, chief executive at one of the region’s newest fast-growth businesses, proton beam therapy company Proton Partners. Founded last February, the firm is opening cancer centres in Manchester, South Wales and London, with two more potentially planned for Liverpool and Cambridge. A centre in Abu Dhabi is also in the pipeline.

“I was in the fortunate position if starting with a blank piece of paper because no one in the country was delivering proton beam therapy,” said Moran. “So my first challenge was to build a business around very little information. It was my challenge to convince investors that it was sensible to build these centres.”

Nonetheless, Moran raised £70m in equity and £30m in debt funding, putting the business in a strong position to dominate the UK’s high-tech proton beam therapy market.

Meanwhile, Colin Kershaw, finance director at marine consultants and surveyors Brookes Bell in Liverpool, cited cultural differences and satisfying capital requirements as the main obstacles to managing a growing business. “Doing business in China has been very interesting – and very challenging on a cultural level,” said Kershaw.

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