The first 6 months of our latest acquisition 🎢 what a ride it’s been so far.
Being completely honest...
Buying a business is not easy (and despite all the obvious benefits of owning multi-million pound businesses, there are some real challenges that aren’t for the faint hearted). It requires patience, focus, resilience, vision and many other things that challenge and grow you as a leader. It requires you to put your ego and your fears second to those of the team you are just meeting for the first time, because they are now working for strangers whose agenda they don’t know - and that is scary for anyone.
But it is an absolute privilege to go through this. To get to know and work with people who are so passionate about the business and what they do. To work with customers who are leaders in their own industries and who are building fascinating and important products - like rockets! And to feel like you matter and that what you do matters is something I try not to take for granted.
Thank you to the existing Mantec team for welcoming us in and showing us the ropes. What a fabulous business you have built together with the former owner Peter and the owner before him! You have created a platform for growth and we are so grateful to be the next stewards of this business to take it forward.
Our plan for the next 6 months:
👫 Continue to grow the team - we have already welcomed several new engineers. The business had more machines than people when we bought it so we’ve been on a mission to maximise capacity and this is almost complete. We also want to look after our team as best we can, this includes our new benefits scheme but also a wider review on culture.
📚Replacing the decades of knowledge of the former owner has not been easy and we will continue to invest in training and developing our team of engineers. So far we have had to rely on external training. We want to develop our in house training ability.
🤝 Continue to grow our customer base and focus on providing the best, most helpful service we can. It’s inevitable that just like us, our customers businesses go through ups and downs. One of our first focuses has been to increase our resilience to this and this will continue to be a key focus - as it should be for any business who wants to grow.
📈 Keep looking for ways to improve ourselves and our systems, rewarding and encouraging our team to contribute their ideas for this. We will be extending the MRP system we use in our other machining business EGL Vaughan, we will be updating our branding and being more proactive in our marketing, as well as other top secret projects!
❌And the most important - learn from every problem, failure and mistake we make - because we will make them. If we didn’t make them we wouldn’t be pushing ourselves. To quote George Clooney “Success teaches you absolutely nothing. It’s the mistakes you make and the mistakes other people make that teaches you what you need to know.”
Here's to the next 6 months!