Dyer Engineering has been changing over the last four years under the astute leadership of Graeme Parkins who spoke to Insider about recent milestones.
Revenues, production, staff numbers and profits have all increased since Graeme took over the business from previous owner Paul Dyer in 2013. He and his team set out a strategy for growth, part of which was to diversify into new markets.
At the time the company was reliant on one big customer, and Graeme knew he needed to be more proactive in securing more business. “We needed to get out there more, to market ourselves, meet more people and network to develop more opportunities,” he said.
They invested in more factory space and took out a lease on another 70,000 sq ft which gave them a total of 105,000 sq ft. “We realised that if we wanted to work for blue-chip customers we needed to demonstrate we had the capacity to do so. We also invested around £1m in machinery to increase our capacity.”
Investment also went into staff and the culture of the business. “We recruited new people and established our apprenticeship programme. We looked at how we ran the business and what our values were and did a lot of work to determine what Dyer Engineering was all about, what we wanted to be known for and how we wanted the business to perform. All this work was put under the heading of ‘Smarter Stronger Together’. And these are our core values today.”
There are three elements to the company’s new mantra. Graeme explained: “The ‘Smarter’ element means becoming the best in the world at making challenging fabricated machine components. We want it to be challenging and complex stuff, dealing with high-end customers.
“‘Stronger’ means driving the economic of the business to generate more profits. If our finances are strong and we can reduce costs we can share the benefits with our customers to help them to drive more sales which in turn drives more sales back to us.”
Source – Insider Media