The Times - UK (2022-06-13)

the times | Monday June 13 2022 43

Business

A business support organisation that

has provided advice to thousands of

manufacturers has warned the govern-

ment not to “throw away” its expertise

when European Union economic

development funding runs out next

March.

Oxford Innovation Advice, which

has run the Manufacturing Growth

Programme since 2016, said it was

concerned that local authorities would

cut advice services and financial

support to business when funding

switches from EU regional develop-

ment schemes to the government’s UK

Shared Prosperity Fund. The latter was

announced in April, with £400 million

of funding allocated to local authorities

in regions that previously received EU

funding from April 2022, rising to

£1.5 billion in the year from April 2024.

Local councils must explain what

they will spend the money on, in con-

Richard Tyler

Fears for business support

group when EU cash is cut

trast with the EU funding scheme

under which they and other organ-

isations such as Oxford Innovation

Advice bid for funding.

Jane Galsworthy, managing director

of Oxford Innovation Advice, said its

work matching manufacturers with

specialist advisers had helped to boost

productivity, job creation, exports and

digitalisation at many of the 4,140

companies it has worked with since its

inception.

The programme it runs operates

across 18 Local Enterprise Partnerships

in England. Dean Barnes, its regional

director, said the “fragmented nature”

of the new funding regime meant it

would be difficult to replicate the same

quality of support.

The Department for Levelling Up

said the funding “matches previous EU

funding, while giving local people

control of how the money is spent...

enabling communities to invest in the

priorities that matter to them”.

small chain of establishments in Padstow gives him a “tight-knit” group that he can try to “sculpt into something amazing”

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Business

Set your course

and track your

progress against it

infrastructure. The moves should

mean we can better focus on them

and serve our customers. Without

the five-year planning approach, this

change may not have happened. A

guiding principle is each business

should be able to sustain itself and

not be dependent for its success on

one client. Grounds maintenance

remains our core business, but the

others are equally important parts

of the Ground Control family.

leadership lines

No business will succeed without a

clear leadership structure. We could

see that we needed to restructure to

make sure lines of communication

and reporting were right. Jason

Knights, our managing director, set

up his executive committee team,

which sets strategy, an executive

team to implement the strategy and

a senior leadership team to

communicate the strategy through

the business and deliver specific

elements. The intent here was to

have a structure to make decisions

and to be agile while delegating to

people at the correct level. We have

backed this up with investment in

training for our top 70 people, not

only the leadership but others with

high potential, to bolster skills, plan

for succession and build resilience.

The next essential strand was to

apply our four strategic priorities —

connecting with

customers, gearing for

growth, embracing

technology and

innovation and driving

performance and

efficiency — at a

practical level to each

business. I will go into

more detail on this in

my next column. In

addition, focusing on the

environment, carbon

neutrality, biodiversity

and net zero are key to

who we are: this has to

run through everything

we do, at every level and

in every business unit.

adjusting for events

Having adapted to the challenges of

Covid, we are now wrestling with

inflation and rising costs. We are

considering the implications both

for staff wages and for the fees we

charge our customers, given the

rising costs in our supply chain.

There are no easy answers here, but

working through the options and

being proactive is key.

Our five-year plan gives us a

platform for sustained performance

and growth. Year one has been

successful, but in year two we need

to spend more time on how we

innovate and utilise technology and

data to manage the growth and keep

ahead of the competition. That is

crucial: as a business, you simply

must keep stretching yourself.

Simon Morrish is chief executive of

Ground Control, based in Billericay,

Essex. He and his fellow directors

Kim Morrish and Martin Leuw are

sharing their experience of trying to

double the size of the business to

£250 million in sales in the next four

years while keeping sustainability at

the core of what they do

L

ike many companies, at

Ground Control we work to

five-year business plans. I

would recommend this

approach to the leadership

of any business. Drawing up your

plan really makes you think about

your strategic priorities, what

matters to you as an organisation

and how you are going to deliver

value to your customers and staff.

Having a rolling five-year cycle

forces you to look beyond the

limitations of a one-year budget and

to make decisions now with an idea

of the impact in future years. It gives

you something to track your

progress against and helps you to

build for the long term. It is like

having a map: the best way to know

where you actually are.

The plan should not be regarded

as a static document that cannot be

changed. Quite the reverse: it is

essential to review it and to consider

whether you need to adjust it in the

light of things that have happened

either externally or internally. This

probably has never been

more relevant than in

today’s fast-moving and

unpredictable

environment. We have a

review every year in

July. More on that later.

We are now one year

into our latest five-year

plan and we are making

great progress. In year

one we grew our

revenue organically by

more than 20 per cent

from £126 million to

£153 million, with a

slightly lower growth in

earnings before interest,

tax, depreciation and

amortisation as we invested for

future growth.

planning process

As a business we knew where we

wanted to go but needed to refresh

how we were going to achieve it. We

spent five months up to May 2021

working through the detail. We

divide Ground Control into five

business units: grounds

maintenance, winter maintenance,

utilities arboriculture, rail &

infrastructure and landscape

construction. Each has its own plan

that together form the overall plan.

Having five small plans means that

each one is achievable, but if all of

them are met there will be a

significant uplift in the performance

of Ground Control as a group.

Through this work we realised

that we needed to restructure our

businesses to help them to grow and

focus, while also making sure they

stuck to our long-term plan for our

repeat business and gross margins.

It led us to move our work with the

Environment Agency from grounds

maintenance into our utilities

business and our Highways England

work from construction into rail &

Simon

Morrish

“

No business

will be able

to succeed

without a

clear

leadership

structure

SIMON BURT/ALAMY