So John, thanks very much for each other, I really appreciate it. So first quick question is how did you get into the seat that you are in now? What's the quick journey of how you ended up there? Well, I ended up at Frederick Cooper in January 97, so I've been here 27 years, while filming as a sort of a management trainee. A little bit kind of through people I knew through the rugby club at the time, and then sort of stayed here all that time, lots of different roles, kind of ended up in the sales role, barely quickly to be honest, and the sales director from 2003. And then, yeah, sort of the MD role came up about three years ago, and I was already kind of doing it really, so it was kind of an actual transition into the MD role then, so yeah. And just Frederick Cooper, what he does in terms of its services and products? Yeah, so with paint spray and powder coating, but we kind of, we're at the sort of top end of the market, if you like, painting premium products, or our big end customers are Rolls-Royce motor cars, Bentley Motors, Aston Martin, Bugatti Lotus, JLR, that sort of title, about 70% automotive, wet painting, plastic and carbon fibre parts, so maybe piano black parts on the interior of cars, and a lot of brake calipers over the years, and the powder coating is a bit more industrial, so maybe exterior side steps on cars, or high-fi components, power tools, electronics parts, that sort of stuff, really interesting mix of stuff. Absolutely, and I can't imagine the quality issues when you're dealing with those kind of high-end car brands, and I've seen all your accreditations, which I'm sure play an important part in all that kind of thing. So, no, excellent. So, I'm going to jump in straight away because looking at the website, one of the things that I think you mentioned in there is all about, and it is in manufacturing, it's about continual improvement. Do you have any particular managers about how you ensure you get continual improvement in the business? I think that the best way we've continually improved is by looking after our people, and having the same people kind of around, and kind of putting training into those guys, and improving them, and then almost improving the teams themselves, and then kind of seeing what's going on in other areas of the business, and as we've won a better and better project with more prestige, clear and tell, we've kind of had to up our game, and then that sort of cross-learned across the team, and I think it's that real sort of team approach. People come to work with Reggie Cooper and they stay, because we generate a good atmosphere, a good vibe, there's not really any politics. People just get on with it and help each other, and I think that's been the most successful part of it, looking out for our people and having that people-eath awesome team. In the sense that the team is the thing that makes things happen, and I'm glad you got that answer goes in a way. I think that really is true, but I did notice, and a couple of things again, looking at your website. Obviously, it looks like you grow your own, which I think is always great once you've got apprentices coming in. Again, this was a really changed direction on this, kind of 21-22, when people were getting hard to find, and resources were difficult, the war in Ukraine had started, there were supply chain issues, skill shortages, and all that sort of stuff. So, we put a real emphasis on training. We set up one of our really experienced shop floor supervisors, managers, who we really didn't want to take off the shop floor because it was so valuable to us, but it was the best thing we ever did, because he's so much more valuable to us, helping training people. So, we've set up a French Agupre Academy, apprentices is one side of it, but not just apprentices, it's all about training and upskilling everybody, so that there's a career path for people. So, if you come in as a general operative, people can see that they can be trained up to be a sprayer, and there's more money and more skill to that, but also, when you're a sprayer, we'll start people as maybe a level one sprayer, and you can get skills to become a level two, level three, level four, and earn money accordingly, and then we want to bring our own people up through that, and then into team leader role supervisors. So, most of our recruitment is at the bottom end, with a view that will train people up given the skills, and that's worked really well. Absolutely, and retaining those people is the important bit, but you mentioned that early in terms of you really look after the team and make sure people feel that they're looked at. I did notice the other thing as well, and I don't think I've seen this for quite a long time, but the perfect attendance award, I think that's brilliant, so you highlight the people who actually, you know, so, and I like the idea, the guy who actually has the perfect attendance award, his reward, he's actually, and you give him a day off, I think. You can make it up, could you? Brilliant. Excellent, and I mean, it's for everybody else to see when other people are holding their torch in terms of showing perfect attendance, they think, well, why shouldn't I do the same thing? So, I really got a sense of the culture of your kind of business, by looking at that and seeing the things that you do, I think that's brilliant. So, what about you in terms of then sort of general keeping on the same subjects? I'm going to lead a shape. What do you think has been your biggest leadership learning, I guess, over all these years in terms of running the business? I think for me, it's kind of seeing the potential of the people that we've got here and kind of letting them do it themselves without kind of micro-managing it, and so it's kind of that trust thing and empowerment, and we've done a few exercises around that, and it's not just from me down to kind of my top team, if you like. We encourage the managers to trust, to tell the supervisors and shop floor leaders that they're trusted and that they can make decisions, they don't have to come in the office with every every little decision to be made, they know the answer, they're just almost wanting, sometimes wanting reassurance, but we're trying to let people know that they're trusted and trusted to make mistakes, we all make mistakes, don't we? But that's the way we learn. People aren't going to get sacked for making a mistake, it's part of everyone's learning and development, isn't it? And we get much more done as a business overall, if those decisions are being made further down the business so that people further up can think more about the bigger picture in their team, and for me it's about the bigger picture, about the business, and looking forward six months, three years, five years of where we're going to be, what we're going to put into that, so if I'm bogged down with worrying about something that's going on, you know, every five minutes, you've got no chance of doing that. No, absolutely, absolutely. I think it's Stephen Bartlett that said in the guy around social chain, and he's now tracking, he says the only good thing that he really does is he was recruit good people, and if you recruit good people, and they actually do a good job, that actually then really makes the business work, so I get that. No, that's good. And so moving on and thinking about the future, what do you think the challenges are going to be going forward in your business? What comes to mind when you think about that? Yeah, so for us, we're very hands-on, so everything we do is hands-brain, hand-prepping, hand-polishing. Obviously, you know, there's automation that could be a threat to that, but also it could be an opportunity for us in some of our areas. We're starting to automate some processes and actually put more, it's more almost admin processes, we're putting more sort of apps and tech and software that can help maybe reduce admin time at the moment, and we're looking to see where automation can help. Because we're very hand-finished, there's the pride in that, and that's what we do. The kind of automation that we've looked at can't achieve that yet. Will it be able to in the future? I don't know, so we've got to keep our eyes open to that, and AI and things like that. But kind of my gut feel at the moment certainly says for a few years, there's going to be a marketplace for that hand-finished kind of element. So we kind of sell ourselves on the craft and the graph, so it's hard work, but we're almost quite an arts and crafts business, and whilst there's a lot going on in the paint booths, there's quite often more going on outside the paint booths. The painting might be a small element, it might be a lot more about intricate masking and polishing and preparation and the spray much to be part of the process. That idea of automation, robotics, what it may be, but I guess the certain processes, I think that's the point you're making, but they'll always be the need for the human eye to look at things. Especially New York kind of visits where high-quality components, no, I get that, I get that. No, excellent. So just thinking about your business has obviously grown and scaled up. Are there any things that come to mind about scaling up in terms of making sure that the business really continues to offer its quality and everything that it does even though you actually scale anything? Any learnings from that? Yeah, my main learning would be it's quite hard. And I think as you grow, kind of you want this nice smooth upward line, don't you? And I look at our sort of growth over the years, and we have done that generally overall, but it's kind of a bit steeper here than it flattens off. And then you have periods where it tails off, and I look back at our long-term journey and there's a big dip off in 2008, the financial credit crunch that I obviously dip off again at sort of COVID. And it's been hard this year for us, it cost a living crisis and all that sort of stuff. It's definitely a bit tough. We feel that we're really poised at the moment to take that next steep section of growth. So it's been a bit, we thought it would happen already, but it's been, you know, so if you ever got new projects starting, we've got volumes going up on current jobs. So it feels like we're on the cusp of the next big, as it steep. That's exciting when you know that the next, the next one's coming. And how do you, do you have issues sometimes in balancing the workload and resource, which actually comes first? Do you really want to know that the volume's coming before you put the resource in? Or are you brave enough sometimes to believe that you can put it with your thing? I mean, it's everybody has this issue, don't they? So that's exactly what we're living, you know, today. We've got, you know, some big projects starting. We're going to need new people in. We're hoping that we're going to need another 20 to 30 people between now Christmas, probably. And, you know, we're going to be growing those people ourselves and training them. And we've already made a start on that with recruitment to bring people in. But we'd also kind of pre-planned ahead. So we've got guys and girls as well. Particularly in polishing, we think we're going to have challenges when we grow our own polishers. That's the resource that's going to be stretched over the next three or four months. We have the similar processes where we know people have got the right sort of attitudes with polishing already and networking well in the business. Some of them have had a go at it and just haven't got maybe as much polishing work at the moment. But we've got the prime ready to come into that role already so we can hit the ground running as a work as a work ramps. And then we'll sort of backfill those. And then we aptitude test when we're kind of doing assessments for people when we bring them in. So we've got various things that we know that all that person looks like they could be a really good polisher or that person's got a keen eye for detail, they'll be a good masker or that person might be a good sprayer. So when we've got ways of means of kind of finding the right path quickly for people as well. So that's worked well. I know that's interesting. And the point you made there is if you've got an upward trajectory, when you do train and develop your own, that generally comes with a lead time. So that actually then it's not as easy as bringing people straight into a skilled and they start and hit the ground running. But I like your idea of the cross-skilling, which means if you're doing that all the while, then you have the flexibility to move people around, which kind of makes sense. So now I get that. Excellent. I was just going to talk about Made in the Midlands because you're part of that. And that just prompts the question about best practice and looking at other people and learning from what they do. So how does that work for you then, John? Yeah, that's been great, really. I mean, we've been part of Made in the Midlands for 10 years or so pretty much since it started. So in particular, that's been great for events going to a company to see how they operate. And then just talking to other people at those events as well or the online events. And yeah, that cross-learning thing is brilliant and picking up ideas. And sometimes you go to an event and it's a company that does something that's not aligned with what you're doing. But they might have to make really good going on in their goods inwards or some really good story to tell about something in their quality department or their personal department or their training. And so it's not just about the manufacturing processes. There's so many things that you have to think about outside of that, that there's all sorts of things to be had. And yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And you're right. And people in leadership are all in common, regardless of what kind of business it is. But I guess the Made in the Midlands or the Manufacturing, I guess, hopefully there's tends to be, there's a lot that you know. If you get one golden nugget out of that kind of networking thing or whatever, then that can really be useful and kind of bring that back. So no, that's good. So one final question there, John, whether it's the toughest one or not. But I would tend to ask at the end in terms of so anything or any person or anything that's really inspired you or do you have a particular book that you believe in or a podcast or what can you recommend in terms of things that inspire you? So I'm rubbish on books and podcasts in terms of business books. I'd be, you know, terrible. I'm not the one who asked about that sort of stuff, but I take most of my inspiration from sports. So I mean, my main sport's a goal from rugby, but the biggest one for me over the last couple of years has been the basketball cricket, actually. Just their approach of going for it. So on the big believer of that, you know, we've got a big project coming up, you know, quite easy for us to say, you know, we don't want to do that. We would go for it, you know, and you can have a positive attitude. So the kind of positive attitude, positive mindset type approach, that's what I'm all about. And a lot of that, I think, comes from sports. So I think I play my golf that way, which is why I try and hit the ball too hard off the tee and lose it out of bounds a lot. But so clearly I won't take that forward in business, but that's a technique thing, I think. But yeah, go for it. That's our attitude here. I love that. I really love that. And I think because you're right at the end of the day, sometimes we, perhaps sometimes it's the business books that do that, we can become a bit too risk averse, we're a bit too careful, and therefore progress isn't as fast. And I think the point you made in there is really interesting that not only, okay, you go for it, and the results might come in, you are going to be relatively careful exactly how far you go. But it makes it fun for the people. I mean, you're the point about watching the cricket. It makes it fun to watch when it's basketball. And actually, I think it makes fun for staff that actually they think this is exciting. We're going to go for it, etc, etc. And yeah, and it's ironic and in front of kind of way, because yeah, it does exist there in cricket. And perhaps, perhaps recently, we haven't seen it in football, interestingly. I think everyone would like to see that, wouldn't they? Absolutely. And we know the teams that are really kind of entertaining go for it, and yeah, and they can get the results. So no, I love that. And yeah, you've given me that interesting thought, I'm going to perhaps take that back to my people I work with and say we might have a bit of a basketball program to back on and make it happen. So hey, John, I really appreciate your time, John. Thanks so much indeed for that. Good luck with the business. Obviously, it's going to, you've got a growths work coming, which is just fantastic. Do all those wonderful things with people. That's terrific. So really appreciate your time and good luck for the next phase of the business.
