RepoRt & Accounts “WE ARE MAKING THE FUTURE” › Int pdf's › Woking int.pdf · WOKING ECONOMY RepoRt & Accounts are filled with commuters who then go into London to spend their

WOKING ECONOMY RepoRt & Accounts

helped them to develop The McLaren Technology Centre, the headquarters of the McLaren Group and all of its companies, located on what was Green Belt land, and since then they’ve grown from 400 staff to more than 2500.”

Morgan also mentions manufacturers the Wandsworth Group, which the council helped to relocate to the Woking business park in Sheerwater when it wanted better premises, enabling their previous site to be developed into an Asda supermarket. “We helped to save and create jobs that could have gone elsewhere,” says Morgan.

“It’s not about a local council telling businesses what they should be doing – it’s about understanding what they want, looking for mutual interest, and seeing if we can help. And sometimes we can’t. If that’s the case, they will know sooner rather than later and if we can help we will. Either way we won’t waste their time.”

Morgan was brought up in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and lived in Chichester before moving to Woking, where he has been chief executive since 2006. “My first impression of the south east was: why is everyone so insular, why aren’t they engaging in conversation to find solutions to problems?”

Nor could he understand the “inferiority complex” of

Taking steps to develop economy

“We do unusual,” smiles Ray Morgan, chief executive of Woking Borough Council. Such as its trading subsidiary Thameswey, a commercial and housing development company set up to provide ‘economic stimulus’ to Woking, ‘under instruction’ from the council, which also provides the finance.

“It means we can take a view on profit margins and step in for the economic benefit of Woking where the private sector fails to do so,” says Morgan. Such as the development of business starter units in 2011, at a time when there was demand but little appetite for speculative development. A year before, Wolsey Place in the town centre (two office blocks, shops, and residential units) was acquired, refurbished, and extended in a joint venture.

Morgan says his priority is to “have open dialogue with businesses to help support the local economy and create somewhere people want to come to work.”

McLaren is another classic example of how the council can work with business, says Morgan. “Everywhere was offering them grants to relocate in the mid-1990s but we

“WE ARE MAKING THE FUTURE”

“Woking has the potential to be Surrey’s economic hub; recognised regionally, nationally and even internationally as a premier location from which to do business. It will offer a modern yet quality environment with a wide range of amenities across retail, leisure and culture. It will be a location where businesses wish to locate to, where people want to visit and where people want

to live.”

As a statement of intent, it’s as emphatic as anything which would front the annual report of a quoted company.

It’s the vision spelt out in the council’s economic development strategy and action plan.

What makes it worth repeating is that it’s actually happening.

HG Wells (1866-1946) - writer and resident of Woking


Woking compared with its neighbour, Guildford. “I spent years arguing that people should stop worrying about Guildford; it’s like having two very different children and trying to compare them to each other. I think we’ve become more confident. We haven’t got the cobbled streets of Guildford town centre but we have a good public realm, shopping centres with easy access for buggies and mobility impaired people and a really cosmopolitan atmosphere.”

That’s something that’s not typically ‘Surrey’, he says. “There’s such diversity – whether people are from traditional commonwealth countries or Eastern Europe, they’re all an active part of the community. You can hear Brazilian, Russian, even Norwegian accents and that diversity brings the sort of vitality that London has, which is a positive. It all goes towards making people think it’s worthwhile to come here.”

Morgan agrees that Woking’s location is a unique selling point for businesses. “It’s extremely well connected, with the London airports and with Farnborough airport for private flights. There’s no gateway you can’t get to from here within forty-five minutes in order to be on your way to anywhere in the world.”

And laughs as he realises the possible implication of


are filled with commuters who then go into London to spend their money,” he muses.

“The loss of revenue during the recession was short term. But it freed up parking spaces for businesses and shoppers. Now we’re in danger of not having enough spaces. If those 600 commuters were still parking we would have income but not business growth.”

Morgan is aware of the irony that an area focused on sustainability should also be, historically, a hub for the oil and gas industries. “It sounds contradictory,” he admits, “but actually the science, the skills used in oil and gas are not dissimilar. Some of these companies are also at the forefront of renewables; one is transferring their oil and gas sector expertise to build offshore wind turbines.

“The reality is that we are a carbon intensive society – we still need oil and gas, so we can’t be too precious; and after all, the biggest employer here in the seventies was British American Tobacco. Let’s focus on finding ways of using that fuel more efficiently.”

Innovative manufacturerlooks for integration

Three years ago, Semmco found it needed more space, which meant it would have to relocate “We were changing from functioning as a jobbing shop to becoming a manufacturer,” explains managing director Stuart McOnie, “like growing up from a teenager to an adult.

“Initially, the labour and property costs in Wales looked enticing compared to Woking. But after a while we realised that we had a nucleus of staff who we would probably lose in the move, and our airline clients are mainly at Gatwick and Heathrow. With the help of Woking Borough Council we found our new 13,000sqft unit, which was officially opened by Ron Dennis, chairman of McLaren. And since the move, with business process changes and the way we now rescource materials, output has been improved by 50%.

If there’s a succinct description of McOnie’s approach to business it would be ‘integration by innovation’. Semmco as a consequence have become a market-leader in the design and manufacture of access steps and platforms as well as other support equipment for maintenance work, predominantly for the rail industry and the aviation sector. Some 35% of production is exported.

What the company has been doing is to come up with new concepts which improve the way specific tasks are undertaken - and the various products are complementary.

For example, Semmco designed a trolley so that the nitrogen cylinder used to inflate aircraft tyres can be more easily loaded in an upright position - a cradle device then lowers it - so there’s no additional lifting equipment required. Then the company developed a booster system so that more useable gas could be extracted from the cylinder.

“Changing the brake packs on an aircraft was an extraordinary manual handling task,” says McOniue.

his remark, adding: “It probably sounds odd to promote how quickly you can get away from Woking – but in global connectivity terms that’s vitally important for international companies based here to get to the rest of the world, which is where they work. And it means we’re equally well connected for anyone to come here.”

As well as physical connectivity there is also great connectivity from a technology perspective. While 4G mobile services were taking time to spread out of the capital and other large cities in the UK, Woking became the first Surrey town to receive the service, making it one of the most connected places in Europe. And there are plans for free wi-fi throughout the town centre.

The council, says Morgan, has tried to create an environment that’s “more like Singapore than Poundbury [the experimental new town in Dorset]. We’ve thought about what people want a place to be: a city-style environment that young aspirers, people who will drive businesses of the future, will like as a working environment.”

Meanwhile, a major redevelopment of the town centre will by 2017 create Victoria Square, with plans approved for 125,000sqft of new retail floorspace (anchored by Marks & Spencer), a one hundred and ninety-bed four-star hotel with conference and spa facilities, and 392 apartments. The scheme will be delivered by Bandstand Square Developments Limited, a joint venture between Woking Borough Council (and owners of Wolsey Place), property investment company Moyallen (owners of the Peacocks Shopping Centre in the town), and Surrey County Council.

Another Woking Borough Council initiative has resulted in Woking becoming a world leader in providing electricity without relying on the national grid. Next to the first fuel cell power station in Europe stands the only statue in Britain to Sir William Grove, a little known British physicist who invented what he called a liquid battery in 1839.

The power station has been described in the national media as ‘one of the wonders of Woking’. In fact across the borough are mini-power stations, district heating schemes and thousands of electricity-generating cells on roofs. The town centre, including the council offices and Holiday Inn, are entirely energy self-sufficient and surplus electricity is exported. HG Wells, who lived in Woking - he wrote War of the Worlds here - would have been impressed.

“It’s all part of Woking being ‘a green and pleasant place’, says Morgan. “The council has put £4million into creating walking and cycle routes along the canal into the town centre, because about 91,000 people live near the canal and by improving that connectivity we can reduce the pressure on the roads,” Morgan explains. The potential is demonstrated by the need to double the 260-space bike park at the station, and the increased take-up of cycling thanks to the new paths meant 600 fewer people per day were using the council car parks.

That meant a significant drop in revenue, but Morgan took a long-term view. “The dilemma for councils is that we need revenue to run services, and parking brings income, but it doesn’t add to the vitality of the place if the car parks


Landmark buildingdemonstrates integrity

“From where I’m sitting talking to you I can see trees on one side of our building, and trees on the other,” says Karen Gravestock. As director of people and places at WWF-UK (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) she has been heavily involved in the charity’s move from their former site in Godalming to their landmark new eco-friendly premises in Woking.

Classified as ‘outstanding’ by BREEAM, and a recipient of an A-rated environmental performance certificate, the Living Planet Centre shows how it is possible for people to live in harmony with nature, says the organisation. Through the smart use of design, materials and technology, like ground source heat pumps and solar panels on the roof, ratings for the Living Planet Centre demonstrate that WWF they have created one the greenest buildings in the UK – a state-of-the-art property that has minimal environmental impact.

It’s all very fitting as a home for the world’s leading independent conservation organisation. Launched in1961, WWF works in more than 100 countries to address the environmental challenges facing the planet, from

“There were wheel-changing machines, but we designed a changer which would remove and replace the brake as well. A key feature is that the device lifts the new brake pack from its packaging and places it on the changer. Then we put the entire maintenance package into a trailer, creating a mobile pit-stop for an airline, carrying 1.5tonnes of equipment which they could drive to different airports - the ultimate in integration.”

It was at a trade show in Miami that McOnie saw a company selling aluminium access steps, and immediately saw the potential for variable height steps for aircraft maintenance that could be adjusted to meet the size of a specific plane. And he could see how its reach could extend to the rail industry as well. The company now manufactures a range of options.

As part of their repertoire, Semmco have also been selling escape and rescue breathing apparatus. And the company invested £650,000 to design and develop a range which is lighter to wear and only needs servicing after nine years instead of annually.

A breakthrough came with a £2million contract from the prison service. “There are 1000 fires in cells a year,” explains McOnie. “Guards were just rushing in instead of putting on the previous apparatus because that took too long and was cumbersome to wear. Now every prison in the UK uses the Semmco rescue breathing system.”

Stuart McOnie,managing director,Semmco


the environment could be reduced,” she explains. WWF wanted a site to be within fifteen miles of the existing premises, and the chosen location in Woking was attractive because it was a brownfield site surrounded by woodland, a canal, and an area of special scientific interest in the form of Horsell Common: “A good location for enabling us to have contact with nature,” says Gravestock.

Opting for a new-build meant the WWF could achieve their wish of giving the public better access to what they do. A visitor experience ‘learning zone’ and auditorium were incorporated, and since opening the Living Planet Centre has had more than 26,000 visitors and has played host to dozens of visits by schools and other groups, including workshops about the charity’s campaigns.

“Woking is also attractive to us because of the excellent rail links to London and it has a green-minded council that’s also focused on sustainability and reducing its impact on the environment,” explains Gravestock. “There’s very much a community focus and we enjoy being part of that community through events like Fairtrade Fortnight and the Food & Drink festival.” She says the charity has also collaborated on events such as school visits with its nearest neighbour, The Lightbox gallery.

Her suggestion for making Woking a better place still is a park and ride scheme. “It would make Woking town centre much more accessible, especially as people are more concerned now about the cost of travel and parking.”

Why location is win-win

It was a need for more space that drove B2B travel agency Global Travel Management into central Woking from a

the survival of species and habitats to climate change, sustainable business and environmental education.

Key to the organisation’s success is being trusted for its science-based approach and its integrity, says Gravestock. While there may be some overlap in terms of goals and supporter base with activist environmental organisations, Gravestock says the approach taken by WWF is not so much about activism as about gaining influence through constructively challenging governments and corporations both here in the UK and overseas.

There is much to be done, says Gravestock. “Our recent Living Planet report showed that if we keep on living the way we do, our unsustainable consumption of the world’s natural resources mean we would need three planets to sustain us all. Tackling these challenges means working with big companies to influence them to invest in sustainability, and ensuring we are communicating this message to consumers through the retailers and manufacturers that they buy from.”

One key victory was persuading the Soco oil company to end its drilling activities in Virunga National Park, the oldest in Africa and a World Heritage site. Africa, along with China, India and Brazil, is a core area for current activities.

The charity had been based in Godalming for twenty-five years before its move to Woking in 2013. The lease had come up for renewal and there were several options, says Gravestock: extending the lease and retrofitting to make it more environmentally friendly; buying and refurbishing another property; or designing and constructing their own. The most economically viable – and most desirable given the charity’s approach to the environment - was the latter. “If we could find the right site we could create something exemplary to demonstrate how a building’s impact on

Inside WWFKaren Gravestock


There are no plans to consolidate at Woking – or Nottingham. “It would be too much trouble,” says Cooper. “We’ll remain a two-centre business and invest in both to make sure each can prosper in their own right.”

The business – then called BIW Technologies - was born in 1999 when Cooper and his now co-directors had the idea to create software to help real estate and construction-based businesses exchange information over the internet, such as technical drawings, design plans and procurement and costing information.

At the time the building industry was very traditional, typically using couriers to deliver plans. The idea of the new business was to transfer the same information more economically and more securely through the cloud. Cooper worked in sales at multinational software corporation SAP at the time and says the idea was “new, innovative and viewed as risky.” However, with the City infatuated by the dotcom craze it proved to be the right idea at the right time; they quickly managed to raise £1million in backing and were up and running within three months, getting a vital head start on rivals. BIW grew steadily for six years or so, going through a number of funding rounds. They even opened an office in Dubai that went “stormingly” well.

But at the end of 2007 things started to slow down dramatically as the building sector began to slide. Their business model was based on monthly subscriptions, which meant the need to bring new customers on board all the time to maintain revenue streams. That wasn’t happening and as more and more customers dropped off, revenue shrank. Then the Middle East market came to a halt,” recalls Cooper, “and every contract came to a halt; in just six months our revenue was gone, and cash disappeared,” recalls Cooper. “Businesses are supposed to experience challenging times but no-one knew this was on the cards. We didn’t know if there was a way out.” The solution was the unpleasant process of drastic cost cutting. The company went from having 110 staff to having just forty in one year. “That really hurt,” says Cooper. “I felt horrible. It was a very different business by the time we’d finished, but a lot did worse than us and failed – we’re still here.”

Today, staffing numbers have edged back up to over fifty. What helped was being bought in 2010 by German market leader Conject, while BIW was “at the bottom of the trough”. According to Cooper, it helped the company get back on a level playing field.

As head of the UK operations of an international business he’s now answerable to the German board but says he is given considerable autonomy. And an advantage of being in an international firm, he says, is that the UK end can sell products created by sister companies.

“Our point of difference is that we compete on trust and reliability, not price,” says Cooper. Referring to recent stories about hacking of data kept in the cloud, he taps his desk in a mock ‘touch wood’ gesture. “Do you know,” he says, “we’ve never had a breach, but it’s absolutely nothing to do with luck. They key is to put protection in place. It’s like a house – you put in the strongest possible locks and install the best alarm system.”

nearby village, where founders Scott and Natalie Pawley lived and had set the business up in 1997. And central to the decision to buy Kingsway House to accommodate their twenty-five staff was that there were no transportation issues. “We believe in having a work/life balance, so we didn’t want people taking hours to get to work and back home again,” says Scott Pawley. “Equally, if we have to look beyond Woking for new staff, we can advertise in London because new recruits can easily get to Woking in twenty minutes by train, going against the commuter flow. It’s a win-win.”

Also important to choosing the location was that staff should be able to break out at lunchtimes. “No-one wants to sit at a desk through their lunch break,” says Pawley. “From here we can stroll to the main shopping centres. The only downside is in the provision of all-day parking, but that is the same for any town centre. We’re lucky to have a car park but staff already have to double-park and if we get any bigger it would become an issue.” With that in mind, Global Travel Management encourage staff to cycle to work and has installed a shower.

“As a travel agency with clients all over the country and overseas, we could be based anywhere, but actually we like Woking,” explains Pawley.

Double the space for same rent

When cloud-based software supplier Conject UK decided to move out of their premises in Victoria, London, in order to get more office space without increasing costs, their new location boiled down to a choice between Staines and Woking, as it was important for the staff to be able to nip up to London several times a week.

“Our idea was to double the amount of space but keep the rent the same,” says UK director Steve Cooper. “We either had to move out of London or bite the bullet and pay twice as much to stay there.” Research to find the most appropriate location identified that the Woking environs of the M25 would be a good central location based on where the staff lived and its proximity to the two international airports - “a plus point as it would enable overseas colleagues and customers to visit more easily.”

Cooper likes the office location near the town centre. “We did look at moving to a business park but people like being able to walk into town at lunchtime.” On the flip side, recruitment can be difficult because the company is competing for staff with London-based businesses who pay more. “We have lost people who have been able to earn 50% more than we can offer just by jumping on a train,” says Cooper. The answer? “We need to find people who don’t want to commute to London any more.”

Cooper himself lives in Warwick, where he moved from Surrey to ensure that there was a member of the management team who could easily work from the company’s Nottingham office, where half of the staff are based. The Midlands office was opened because of research being done at the university there.

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HQ. Many of them have come from overseas. “That means we’re contributing towards the local talent base as well as drawing from it,” he says. “It gives us a sense of having roots in the local community.”

Norman adds that Woking’s cultural diversity makes it very appealing to an international workforce. “Surrey’s a pleasant place to live and this is a part of it that feels the most diverse and attractive to people used to living in a multicultural environment. I love the fact that Woking subverts the traditional view of a sleepy Surrey country town.”

The business has a deep interest in sustainability says Norman, pointing to the company’s website which leads with a report about water conservation rather than products. And SAB Miller are working locally with WWF on sustainability development and encourage staff to use the new cycle routes in and around Woking – during the summer Norman himself cycles the eighteen miles from his home in Teddington.

A major competitor is based in the north-east and Cooper bemoans the fact that they can get funding and grants. “It’s an unfair situation, given that their cost base is lower already,” he says. “There should be grants to develop business regardless of where a company is located in the UK.”

Cooper would like to see turnover rise by a third to £10million. Conject already have a subsidiary in Singapore and branch offices in New Zealand and the Middle East. There is potential for further growth overseas, says Cooper, for example Hong Kong and Thailand. North America is a target market too. “That’s always been on the radar. We have customers there that we service from the UK and at some point we’ll have a physical presence, probably through acquisition if we can find the right business to buy, as it’s more costly as well as being riskier to open and staff new offices,” Cooper explains.

Closer to home, the plan is to rent another floor at the offices in Woking, which will be converted into training suites and meeting rooms. There are no plans to diversify beyond the business’s existing sectors. “We’re very focused on real estate and construction,” says Cooper. “If we went outside that we would hit competition we don’t even know about, and our market is big enough to give us plenty to go for. We don’t want to pick a fight we can’t win.”

Contributing to local talent base

Visitors to Woking might well enjoy a refreshing beer after their shopping trip, without realising that their chosen tipple comes indirectly from the office block that nestles just outside the shopping malls.

Woking is home to the headquarters of brewers SAB Miller, producers of such well-known beers as Fosters, Grolsch, and Peroni, and employers of some 70,000 people in eighty countries.

Until the end of the apartheid regime in the 1980s SAB Miller’s activities were largely confined to their native South Africa, where they had been operating since the nineteenth century. The end of apartheid, freeing South African companies to expand beyond South Africa – as well as the collapse of the Iron Curtain - opened up new investment opportunities and SAB Miller set about buying up other breweries, mainly family firms or state-run concerns.

They opened their UK operations by listing on the London Stock Exchange as part of their global expansion plans before relocating the international HQ here.

David Norman, senior manager for sustainable development policy, explains that proximity to Gatwick and Heathrow airports was an essential consideration. As an international company, SAB Miller have a lot people flying frequently.

Woking was also attractive because potential employees and offices were available and accessible. “About half of the staff live fairly locally and half commute from London,” explains Norman. About 350 people work at the global

Market Walk, the purpose-built covered market


relocation at some stage and possibly the redevelopment of their existing site. But they won’t move far. “We keep coming to the conclusion that Woking is a good place for our company,” says Webb. “Even my board colleagues who live in Crawley and Portsmouth say we should stay in Woking.”

Standing the test of time “Distinctive new homes and communities which will stand the test of time.” It’s a mission statement that housebuilders William Lacey Group have been delivering in Woking with schemes which incorporate integrated solar panels, rainwater harvesting, heat recovery systems, and the creation of ‘homezones’ where the distinction between pedestrian and traffic priority is blurred.

Founded in 1904, the company moved to Woking from west London in the early 1970s after taking over long-established Woking housebuilder A&J Simmons. Chief executive Chris Lacey, the great-grandson of the founder, says he wouldn’t even think about a change. “As a regional house builder with property interests in the region we’re able to easily get to places like Reading, Portsmouth and Winchester – they’re very accessible within about an hour’s drive.

They’ve sublet part of their offices to other firms, mainly in the IT and tech sectors. That has generated a community feel, says Lacey, with leads being passed on, boardroom and meeting rooms being shared. He says the location just outside the town centre is “the best of all worlds” for tenants and staff. “We can drive to work without going through the town centre, there’s plenty of car parking, and yet we can walk to the station in twelve minutes.”

“The whole philosophy of Woking Borough Council is one of welcoming business and encouraging innovation,” he says. “Businesses find that discussions with the council start with the attitude of ‘let’s talk and see if it we can make it work for all parties’.”

Process driven canactually add value

“Gone are the days when a service provider needed a London office to demonstrate their credentials,” says Alan Thorogood, chief executive of STL Group, the UK’s largest independent property search company until their acquisition last December by InfoTrack, Australia’s fastest growing legal information provider.

Set up by his father forty years ago in London, STL were ensconced in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, surrounded by their law firm clients, with a second office in City Road close to Companies House. The move to Woking was the consequence of pursuing a lower cost base.

When he became chief executive in 2003, Thorogood

Emotion will result in future growth

As business buzzwords go, emotional print will raise an eyebrow - or two. Metaphorically it also describes the journey taken by Repropoint, which started life as Woking Dyeline providing a service to architects and contractors who needed largescale plans but couldn’t justify having the equally largescale machines in-house. Six branches later, the company could have been marooned by the internet, which allows plans to be digitally flicked across the country rather than being printed off and dispatched by courier. Instead, there was a corporate metamorphosis into Repropoint, and the company began to sell digital print machines as well as becoming a very early adopter of the photo-book.

“A lot of our future growth will be in ‘emotional print’ such as photo books for wedding albums, end-of-year college books, funeral orders of service, and vanity book publishing” explains chairman Mike Webb, who founded the company in 1975.

Growth in demand for photo books has happened possibly because of, rather than despite the popularity of using the internet for sharing photos, he thinks. “My grandchildren live in Colorado and my daughter takes photos of their every move. She sends them to me by email, and I print them out to show friends and family. That’s never going to change. The internet has been both friend and foe for Repropoint. On the one hand, it has opened up a national market for both print and machinery sales, and has enabled the company to close most of the branches we once had around the south as it is no longer necessary to have a physical presence. But the internet also means there is greater competition.”

And there’s another, interesting challenge from the manufacturers of the high-end digital printing machinery - their ability to create obsolescence. Hewlett Packard plan to stop supporting certain machines so Repropoint will have to invest £700,000 in two new ones, even though the incumbents are working perfectly well.

Not that Repropoint intended to run the machines into the ground before re-investing. The company deploys quality as a means of making itself attractive to corporates; six years ago Repropoint achieved their ISO14001 environmental accreditation, which is now complemented by the ISO9001 quality standard. “We use our ISO accreditations to identify and resolve any issue, and if there is a problem, 99% of the time the customer isn’t even aware of it because we’ve already put it right. And by analysing it, we make sure it doesn’t happen again,” says Webb.

Turnover is currently £5.2million, split between printing and machine sales. There are no plans to diversify or make acquisitions so growth will be organic or related to technological change, such as 3D printing. One consequence of technology is that equipment tends to be smaller than before, so Repropoint might look at


supermarket next door, something which most people, often including the conveyancers, don’t realise is not part of standard searches. To really mesh with the client, STL are sufficiently IT-savvy to integrate with a law firm’s case management system, which means that a solicitor or conveyancer doesn’t need to go through the company’s website to procure a report. And when the report is prepared, it’s delivered straight into the relevant part of the case management system.

“It’s about making it as easy and seamless for the client as possible,’ observes Thorogood. “We’ve also developing an app to enable the solicitor, conveyancer, estate agent, and their client to see what is happening in terms of the conveyance process. We have become an integral part of the process, the hub, to facilitate the dataflow.”

The company has thirty people on the road manually collecting data in paper and microfilm form from councils which haven’t got digital archive records. But that could change. The government plans to centralise all the local authority search data which is required at the Land Registry, and has flung £10million at councils to digitise their records in a project which could extend to a decade.

Thorogood is sanguine about any possible threat. “It isn’t just sourcing the information but presenting it in a way which is meaningful,” he explains. “The comparison is calling off a set of accounts from Companies House or buying a report which has calculated all the ratios and interprets the data. And The Land Registry won’t hold all the information we source, for example, a verderers report from the New Forest. “

Future growth could come from acquisition - STL bought a search business based in Burton-on-Trent - to new service lines such as the Lawyer Checker, to ensure that the property vendor and their solicitors are who they say they are before money is handed over.

Location made contribution

Click on the words ‘happy customers’ in the blurb about the history of Harvey Water Softeners, and you’ll be linked to nine pages of video testimonials and copies of letters from, well, happy customers. And managing director Casey Bowden is also happy to say that the company’s location in Woking has made a contribution.

Bowden’s father, Harvey, founded the business in 1978, initially selling Permutit water softeners throughout England and Wales. In 1981 he launched his own product which quickly became a best seller and which, together with Harvey’s Block Salt, revolutionised the softener market in the UK.

In 2001 Harvey Softeners opened their UK manufacturing facility in Woking. “Our workforce are local, loyal people,” says Casey Bowden, who grew up in Woking and later bought his own house here. “We’re right in the centre of our target market - the hard water part of the UK is mainly from the midlands down to the south

decided to focus on property searches and STL ceased company formation and supplying stationery. What helped to justify the decision was the additional work as a consequence of the legislation requiring an environmental search for home purchases; STL were early service providers and suddenly had an additional 500 searches a day to process.

The government’s home information packs proposal - which Thorogood describes as a disastrous piece of legislation - would have magnified that volume. STL were resourced up to manage the preparation of HIPs from day one, but implementation was delayed and then a change at 10 Downing Street meant it was scrapped overnight.

“It was a huge shock,” recalls Thorogood. “We had to reduced staff numbers from 140 to seventy.” That was in 2010, when the domestic property market was heading in the wrong direction. To keep afloat, staff took a 20% pay-cut, which the company later re-paid in full.

In fact 2014 was one of their most profitable years. And Thorogood knows exactly what underpinned that performance. “Throughout the recession we never stopped investing in IT, which has enabled us to automate processes,” he explains. “We used to have five staff dedicated to environmental searches for example; now we have none. We find as much efficiency as possible from technology rather than throwing people at a requirement.”

But STL are more than sophisticated information compilers and disseminators. Thorogood is able to demonstrate how process driven can actually equate to value added. Although the format can be prescribed by the Law Society, STL can package their report with fulsome explanations in plain English of what a tree preservation order means for example, to make it more understandable to the consumer. Their IT system identifies which explanations need to be included in each report. “One law firm told us that it reduces conveyancing time spent with the client by 20%,” Thorogood explains.

What STL also enable clients to do is ‘up-sell’ from a standard local authority search to products which, for example, will identify if there’s a proposal to build a

Alan Thorogood, chief executive, STL Group

Capital connectivity Unrivalled connectivity to London with a frequent 24 minute rail connection to London Waterloo.Global connectivity Situated equidistant to Heathrow and Gatwick, and 40 minutes from Southampton Airport.Driving ambition Reach the M25, M3 and A3 within just 15 minutesCompetitive property solutions Benefit from lower operating costs than the capital, and a responsive market, with 1 million sq. ft. of office and industrial space available, proposed, or under construction.Knowledge Woking has the 10th highest knowledge sector concentration in the UK (from 388 locations, UK Competitiveness Index).Well educated With eight higher education institutions locally, it is no surprise Woking has a highly educated population with 48% qualified to NVQ level 4 and above (13% above the UK average).Professional 53% of the people living in Woking work in managerial, professional and technical occupations, (7% above the UK average).Workforce Woking is central to the 14th largest labour market in the UK.Investment in place An unprecedented £250m programme of investment in public realm, retail and restaurant amenity is transforming Woking’s heart.Modern Surrey living Residents enjoy the benefits of living in Surrey, one of the UK’s most affluent and desirable locations.Green credentials Woking is one of the greenest Boroughs in the UK, with Beacon Status for adoption of sustainable energy and tackling climate change, and leads on the application of innovative transport and energy initiatives.

Contact us

Phone: 01483 743487 Email: [email protected] Web: www.wokingworks.co.uk Twitter: @WokingWorks

Where your business matters

Just 23 miles from the capital, Woking is one of the South East’s premier business locations; a place with an ambitious vision for economic growth and a ‘can do’ approach. Below are just a few of the reasons why Woking should move from your shortlist to your location of choice:

Town centre redevelopment artist’s impression

River Wey navigationMcLaren Production and Technology Centres

Woking is a place where innovation and growth is nurtured and supported – where business matters. To access support and find out more about the specific opportunities and benefits Woking can offer to your business, please contact Woking Borough Council’s Economic Development Team:


everyone’s amazed at the fact that they can be in our offices twenty-five minutes after leaving from Waterloo Station. We have a few staff who commute from the capital and they find it easier than commuting within London.”

A lot of her team now live locally though, including the commercial director, who has recently relocated to the town from London.

Smyth describes the ongoing regeneration of Woking is “amazing,” and highlights the improvements to the Peacock Centre and Wolsey Centre retail developments. “I just hope work will start around the station, as the first impression you would get coming out of the station isn’t very impressive.”

Unusual set-up for a factory

It isn’t often that you’ll see a two-bed hospital ward installed on a factory shop floor, but there’s one in Woking. It’s been constructed by The Wandsworth Group to demonstrate their healthcare management products, including call systems, and trunking for lighting, power cables, and medical gas pipes.

There’s also a competitors wall of shame which has their products mounted on a board for demonstration purposes in the area where the group makes high-end electrical accessories, such as sockets, light switches (royal places and the Bank of England are customers). “We invite potential customers to see how we manufacture our products, to meet the people who are actually making them, and to see and feel the difference,” explains managing director Adam Sherry. “Once they come here, they become a customer.”

He had been a VP parachuted into subsidiaries by Philips to implement transformation programmes. After deciding that constantly travelling worldwide wasn’t compatible with family life, Sherry’s plan was to find a medium-sized company which he could turn-around.

“There is a multitude of small manufacturers in the UK which are run by sixty-something former entrepreneurs, businesses which employ maybe up to 200 people and have become part of the community. But they’ve been losing work to China, and the next generation of the family doesn’t want to take the reins,” he explains.

What happened went partly according to plan. He met Charlie Salter, who had inherited the chairman’s role at The Wandsworth Group, and while he knew he could move the business forward, it was somewhat smaller than he was looking for. And then he fell in love with the company, which meant that instead of pursuing a build-and-sell strategy, he put together a five-year plan to double the debt-free company’s turnover to £20million (divided equally, as now, between electric fittings and hospital products).

“The easiest part of transformation change is cutting costs,” says Sherry, “but that only works if it the process is to get to the core parts of the business which it does well. Simply looking to cut will result in a self-fulfilling prophecy.” And the one lesson he can pass on is that it’s

coast - and we can reach all of our direct-to-consumer area in two hours,” he says. “Woking is really well situated for getting everywhere quickly. We have up to sixty field reps and engineers travelling every day so even a few minutes makes a lot of difference.”

As the business grew, it has developed from 10,000sqft premises in 1981 to the 37,000sqft it has now. Sales grew 20% last year to £17million and this year a 25% increase is forecast. Growth is coming partly from exports, especially to Europe, and partly from having hired an in-house web team and lead generation experts to exploit more sales potential. “We have more of the market and we have put more of what someone called ‘missionary work’ into growing the market. We’re the biggest in the UK now,” says Bowden.

Which will mean there will be a need for more factory space, probably in about three years, but Bowden has no plans to move outside Woking and is talking to the council about possible help. “I don’t know how much they can do as we’re not in a development area,” he says, “but I had a really good experience with the council before when we were struggling with car parking and warehouse space and needed permission to enlarge the premises.”

“You might ask why we don’t move to a South Wales. That’s something we would potentially consider but the savings in rents and rates would have to be balanced against being away from the market we serve. Would we want the head office at one end of the country and manufacturing at the other? I think we would want to stay in one place.

“We’ve gone from being small business to being an SME in the true sense of the description” observes Bowden. “In the past it was one person spinning plates but now we have a strong management team I have to stop myself from taking on everything. It’s a personal challenge to go from being a hands-on doer of tangible work to handling the more academic MD role. Because like a lot of people I build my self esteem around my work ethic and getting stuff done. I’ve had to change my thinking to realise that although I’m not selling or on the factory floor, actually I am getting ‘stuff done’.”

Regeneration is “amazing”

Perfume, cosmetics and skincare distributor SAS started life in 2011 in a small serviced office above a dentist’s surgery in Woking High Street, but following rapid growth moved into its current larger premises opposite the station.

Co-founder and CEO Shelley Smyth chose Woking as a location when she started the business as she lived in a nearby village. “I’d worked in London most of my career and I’d got to the point where I thought it would be nice to have a shorter journey. If I need to stay late at work I know I have only a ten-minute drive home,” she explains.

She likes the fact that rents are lower than in London and neighbouring towns, as well as Woking’s proximity to the capital and its two main airports. “We get a lot of brand partners, retailers and suppliers visiting from London and


performance for twenty-five years or more; each one is hand assembled, with the copper contact fitted with a silver cap. It isn’t unusual for a hotel group to only change the fascia plates for aesthetic reasons because the Wandsworth sockets don’t need replacing.

And Sherry is resolute about the importance of manufacturing to the Wandsworth proposition. “Global companies will move the manufacturing of particular products to whatever country is cheapest for a three to four year period,” he says. “We could move our manufacturing to China tomorrow - I’ve got the contacts and experience to do so - but we can make a good profit by doing it here and with a conscience.”

When Sherry talks about sub-contracting elements of production, he isn’t referring to off-shoring. The work goes to Royal British Legion Industries where it is undertaken by former service people with disabilities.

Not that off-shoring would be suitable to meet the Wandsworth proposition. Customers can have whatever they want in forty-eight hours, and there can be sixty different variants in terms of colour and finish for each catalogue item. Then there are different permutations to factor in. As well as the traditional screw-to-the-wall plate covering a socket, a clip-on version was introduced which makes re-decorating a room easier. “Every hotel group will want something different,” explains Sherry, “and a 400-bedroom property might need 1000 sockets, which isn’t a big enough production run for China.”

Manufacturing at Wandsworth includes toolmaking. “It would cost £14,000 to go to China each time, and our in-

all about speed and openness. “At my first meeting with the employees, I mentioned that the company hadn’t been making money for four years,” he recalls. “They were stunned because they were saying they had never been busier.”

The problem was diversification which had consumed investment and failed to deliver a return. Sherry took immediate action. “If you have to take off a plaster, it’s better to get it over as quickly as possible,” he says by way of analogy.

The Wandsworth Group facility is more like the corporate headquarters of an IT services company rather than a manufacturing plant, with open-plan colour co-ordinated work areas, large pieces of photographic art on the walls, and video screens revealing order intake and delivery performance. The environment is deliberately designed to appeal to the next generation of employees. “There aren’t many young people going into manufacturing roles, and a corporate is likely to take an engineering graduate and put them into marketing,” Sherry muses. “But I question whether the engineering environment itself isn’t part of the problem. Young people need to see it a place they can fit in if they are going to be attracted to join.”

According to Sherry, where a product is manufactured can have an impact on the potential purchaser. “In the Middle East there is a real appreciation of ‘British made’, he says. “It means that if prices are equal, then that’s the feature which will be the difference.”

Another difference can be in the manufacturing itself. A Wandsworth switch will have the same consistency of

Adam Sherry, managing director, The Wandsworth Group The Lightbox gallery and museum


factor is price, then we have to step away. Manufacturing in western Europe will always be more expensive than in India. There’s no point driving ourselves mad trying to nickel and dime it.”

And in turn, that focus created financial momentum, cash flow and profit for Vision, which helped to fund R&D. There are two kinds of R&D, says Curtis. “There’s the routine kind – improving the way items are assembled for example, which has a predictable outcome and works maybe 80% of the time. Then there’s attempting to push the boundaries of what’s possible technically, for instance improving the fidelity of images. This has less of a predictable outcome but the benefit is disproportionate if we get it right. It’s important to invest in the eureka stuff because whatever doesn’t work commercially is kept as a learning tool. There’s no technology company that doesn’t have a room full of white elephants. We can revisit technology we have parked; sometimes you can get more out of something than you originally thought.”

Some 90% of production is exported, and the company has branches in Europe, Asia and the US. “It’s an interesting time, and not just because of the new premises,” muses Curtis. “During the recession we had the mindset of shoring up sales and margins, keeping a beady eye on costs, and focusing on emerging markets. Now we’re changing the market focus because the economies in established economies have been picking up. If we work hard in Germany and increase the market by 5% that’s worth more than increasing the market in Malaysia by 10%. The UK economy doesn’t affect us much – what’s more important is that an American upturn is maintained.”

The overall goal is to increase turnover by 12% and profit by 4% over the next three years.

Curtis is pleased that the government is paying more attention to manufacturing. “The sector has been rediscovered by the government, but it’s funny the way that politicians talk about manufacturing as though they’d invented it.”

The challenge for manufacturing businesses in this region, he says, is the limit to the pool of skilled staff caused by house prices. “It will mean we will only be able to recruit from people who already live here,” he muses. Having said that, Curtis doesn’t think recruitment is quite as difficult as has been claimed. “It’s harder to attract new people than in Germany,” he cedes, “where engineering is more respected and seen as a career to pursue, but it’s possible if you do it properly, including providing apprenticeships supervised by experienced staff.”

Metropolitan feel forthriving businesses

“Think how much the UK could save if we could reduce the nation’s annual heating bill of more than £33billion by just one per cent. Our challenge is to demonstrate our value proposition and how it can cut consumption and cost, and

house toolmaker also maintains the rest of our machinery,” explains Sherry.

He sees commoditisation as a possible threat to any British manufacturer. “When products become less relevant in our lives, and there’s a danger that sockets and switches will fall into that category, we need to add intelligence to beauty and elegance,” he maintains. That realisation lay behind the acquisition of Tronix, makers of lighting control systems, whose technology means the cost can be £350 per room rather than the £5000 for rival systems.

Moving away not a serious option

Microscope manufacturer Vision Engineering has been in the Woking area since it was founded in 1958 on an industrial estate in Send, on land owned by its founder, Rob Freeman, the current chairman, who had grown up locally. The current MD, Mark Curtis, whose family arrived in nearby Knaphill in his late teens, says moving away has never been a serious option, even though the company being in Woking was more a matter of accident than design.

“Initial expediency has built up an important sense of stability, he says. “The stasis, if you like, has become almost overwhelming. When we announced plans to build a new factory in this part of Surrey, we were asked on a number of occasions ‘why are you in the Home Counties: you should be taking advantage of Welsh subsidies’. But most of the directors and staff are local, with families and homes here, and skilled, experienced staff are difficult to find, so once you have, you don’t jettison them to start afresh.”

From March 2016 Vision will have possession of 80,000sqft of purpose-built factory and offices on the Woking-Guildford border (the postal address is the former, the local authority district the latter)

The company began by making optical equipment to inspect mechanical items like engines. Its big break was providing the microscopes for the inspection of RAF fighter jets. This got the founder, a racing car mechanic, into all kinds of work in aerospace and automotive, Woking being rather a hotbed for technology in both industries at the time.

During the 1990s, ironically taking into account overall trends in British manufacturing, production evolved from low volume, high value work that required a lot of technical support into higher volume projects that required less. That coincided with a boom in mobile phone technology, followed by advancing technology in the consumer marketin areas like Blu-ray disks and tablets which required quality control and inspection.

But the key words are “less support” rather than “no support.” “We have to focus on products that can be manufactured with a decent margin, pursue technology we can still charge a premium for,” Curtis explains. “If a technology becomes so commonplace that the competing


Arcom_ad_297x242.indd 1 21/01/2015 13:48:26


for the Norman Foster designed building 30, St Mary Axe, aka The Gerkhin. And while the company works closely with Danfoss, the Danish manufacturer of components for heating systems, SAV Systems have their own patented intellectual property, such as a space-saving manifold.

“With any leading edge activity, there has to be a bit of moving the market towards the company and moving the company towards the market,” muses Fabricus. “There has to be that alignment. The reaction to any new idea which challenges the way something is done can be surprise and then denial. An engineer will come up with reasons for their reaction, and we have to to be ready with clear, unambiguous answers to specific questions. Innovation comes from meeting a challenge, not dreaming something up. Necessity really is the mother of invention.”

Why relocation was an obvious move

Moving his business to Woking in 2012 was a “no-brainer” for Shahid Azeem. Arcom IT were previously based in Guildford but he was offered a “very attractive” deal to relocate to offices in Export House, the completely refurbished former BAT UK & Export headquarters. “Everyone likes this building and everyone knows where it is as it’s the tallest building in Woking, so you can’t miss it” says Azeem.

Azeem says he was encouraged to make the move to Woking because of the council’s “very proactive” attitude towards business. “I like their entrepreneurial attitude,” he enthuses Azeem. “They are committed to making Woking one of the most vibrant towns in the south and it’s rare for councils to think like that.”

His offices house the new business data centre that Arcom is developing in conjunction with the council to help smaller business with their IT data needs and to provide high speed wi-fi throughout the town centre. Azeem puts ‘high speed’ into context by explaining it will offer bandwidth 10,000 times bigger than the average coffee shop’s free wi-fi. “What Woking is delivering no-one else in the UK has got,” says Azeem. “People will say ‘wow’ when they come to Woking.”

Azeem says the opportunity to get involved in this project was another major draw for him. “I really wanted to run a data centre and use it to support local businesses and make it easier for them. In Woking we have over 4600 businesses. Some are huge organisations, like SAB Miller, Petrofac, McLaren and WWF, and that’s a credit to the council for being able to attract and retain them. Yet 96% of Woking’s businesses employ less than twenty people and the biggest challenge for them is having access to the IT and telecommunications they need.”

One of the big draws for Azeem, who is actively involved in community and charitable organisations, was the chance to help start-ups by offering them space in his suite of offices. “When I started my own business as a one-

then whether we can grow fast enough to capitalise on the need. We have to be willing to be a force for change.”

A role that Lars Fabricus, managing director of SAV Systems, can demonstrate has already been undertaken by the company, which designs and manufactures energy efficient heating and ventilation systems.

Originally from Denmark, he graduated from London Business School some twenty years ago, before being appointed MD of what was then a building services company supplying heat and vent components. Seventeen years ago, he led a management buy-out.

Their building housed the origins of the McLaren Group and has been refurbished with Danish style furnishings and windows, with a prominent view of the Basingstoke Canal, which crosses through Woking. “We spend so much of our lives at work, so it should be a nice place,” says Fabricus. “I like the traditional feel of a Guildford, but Woking has positioned itself as a location for thriving businesses. There is more of a metropolitan feel; when I am on Woking Station I feel that I’m already in London.

“The question at the time of the buy-out was whether we saw our future in making a living out of supplying isolation ball valves,” he smiles. “Selling components as a middleman means you are squeezed by both the manufacturer and the customer for margin. As luck would have it, Denmark had been focusing on low carbon technologies since the oil price crisis of 1994 as the country imports all of its energy. Carbon taxes were introduced which resulted in gas and electricity becoming twice the price as in the UK, which served to create an economic imperative and base for low carbon technology research and development.

Instead of having towering power stations, Denmark opted for localised power and heat systems, for a particular street or apartment block, which now account for 70% of domestic property. For their heat and vent, buildings tend to bepart of district schemes, rather than having an individual set up. In the UK, there wasn’t the imperative, and energy consumption was largely ignored by comparison.

So SAV Systems see their role is to help building services engineers apply low carbon technologies, such as systems which results in significantly less heat loss.

Fabricus himself spent five years in New York and then five more in South America, and there’s a multinational feel to the staff roster at SAV, with, for example, a South African general manager, Italian technical manager, and an engineer from Kazakhstan.

“My personality profile is an explorer type, and my background is financial,” explains Fabricus. “When we develop a new product idea, I am involved until we bring it to market, and then I relinquish that role. To start something new requires a lot of energy and that is my natural strength. I’m an MBAer rathar than an engineer. I will look at what is happening in Denmark or Italy or elsewhere and think why can’t we adopt that idea in the United Kingdom. We sourced, for example, underfloor heating from Spain which we consider to have a better horizontal diffusion than other products.”

A breakthrough came when SAV Systems were specified


for the kudos,” says Fitzsimons. “Formula 1 racing cars are seen as more sexy than what we produce. But at least we know the people we have want to work here.

‘And I like being part of the Woking business community rather than on some remote, godforsaken industrial estate out in the wilderness, that has no amenities except an A road that gets you to the motorway.”

Making print come to life

As the third generation of a family business, Natalie Stephens has a real sense of community. “Someone followed us on Twitter because we’d been doing some fundraising for the Woking hospice,” she recalls, “and messaged us to say that as a child he used to walk past our building every day and a lady in reception used to wave at him. It’s nice to be able to make those connections.”

Optichrome Print and Communications, of which Stephens is group MD, was founded by her grandfather in 1963. He had been an engineer at the Vickers aircraft factory at nearby Brooklands before setting up his own printing company. The business has been based in Woking ever since.

The company is now one of the biggest independent printers in the south, and has expanded partly due to acquisitions – ten in the past twenty years – but also as the result of investing in new technology and expanding into other digital marketing techniques such as websites and email marketing campaigns. Stephens says: “My dad thought that when digital took off we would need a smaller factory but that hasn’t happened. We’re starting to creak at the seams a bit now.”

Not in terms of their service offering though. “We are one of the few companies in the UK to be able to offer what is called augmented reality,” explains John Heywood, managing director of Optichrome Print & Communications. “This is cutting edge technology which can, for example, allow readers to hold their phone in front

man band I was very lonely,” he explains. “One advantage for the occupiers of the incubators, which include a law firm, an accountant and an advertising business, is access to other people and the opportunity to exchange business leads.”

He is a staunch defender of the town against critics such as television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who infamously called it Britain’s worst town it was “dull and dreary”. He cites the council’s work on expanding the walking and cycling network, albeit something which isn’t likely to hit a Clarkson hot button; Arcom is involved with developing apps for the initiatives.

Azeem himself is chairman of The Woking Asian Business Forum, a former deputy Lord Lieutenant of Surrey, and has been named one of the Top 100 most influential Muslims in the UK by Royal Bank of Scotland. He was Asian Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006/07, is a former chairman of Woking Football Club and is currently chairman of Aldershot Football club. He is special advisor to Sport Equals, a charity promoting ethnic diversity in sport, and patron of Surrey Law Centre. He was named Surrey Business Personality of the Year and Pakistani entrepreneur of the year in 2010 and chairs Prince Charles’ charity Mosaic South East.

Not surprisingly, he sees a key business attributes is a focus on ethics. Arcom IT was a finalist in last year’s ExxonMobil Corporate Social Responsible Company of the year.

Important to be partof the community

The decision to base contract manufacturer Multipulse in Woking was largely based on “sticking a pin in a map,”jokes founder and chief executive John Fitzsimons. Thirty years ago he was in Maidenhead and his co-director in Crawley, and they wanted a location that was more or less equi-distant.

“Our decision was based purely on convenience,” says Fitzsimons, “although we did think Woking would be a good place because of its proximity to the M25.” That’s been borne out. “Most of our customers – such as Network Rail, South West Trains, Southern and Thales - are in and around the south east,” says Fitzsimons. “We do use Skype and Webex but they are always second-best to face-to-face contact.”

Multipulse provides communication and industrial electronics to the rail, industrial, telecoms, transportation sectors. Their biggest concern is finding staff with manufacturing and engineering skills. “Because of our proximity to London the availability of labour can be an issue,” says Fitzsimons. “The bias in this area is towards office and commercial staff, so we set up an apprenticeship scheme to address this problem.”

Though not completely. “Regardless of the pay rates, young people would rather go and work for a McLaren

John Heywood, Natalie Stephens, Optichrome

presented by ........ ............. ....................


for a New Zealand customer, for example, involved people in that country, the UK, and India. “The challenge isn’t the process of communication,” says Hornsby, “because technology has made that possible and practicable. It’s making sure that the client’s requirements and the way people talk to each other is clearly understood; for example, a software engineer in India might use the word ‘yes’ to say they understand what you are saying, not to mean that they’ve committed to undertake the task.”

The advantage of having an operation offshore is that if a project does over-run, the cost implication isn’t as severe. So why does SFW continue to be based in the UK? “The front end of the operation will always have to be here because most of our customers are in this country and they expect us to have direct contact with them,” Hornsby explains, adding that it’s a pre-requisite with their government projects.

“When a software company loses a customer, the reason isn’t usually technical but is down to communication and the chemistry between people. And if you are the supplier, that means you have to be on top of the situation. There was a customer whose project manager was particularly difficult, which meant that their employees and ours found co-operation much harder. Unless we stepped up and managed the problem, it would have been to our disadvantage, regardless of whether we competed the contract perfectly or resigned.”

One of the ways in which SFW are able to keep synchronised with the customer is by structuring the work in a way which isn’t the norm in their industry. Hornsby explains: “We like to schedule a contract in two-week chunks, involving the customer at every stage, and pausing to review what has been done in that time and what happens next, which means the customer doesn’t get to completion before discovering that it isn’t quite what they want. Our approach means we are not hidebound; that flexibility and agility is built into the process.”

But doesn’t the ISO-laden credentials accrued by SFW make that kind of counter-intuitive? There are certificates for ISO9001, ISO14001, and ISO27001, covering quality, environment, and information security. Hornsby shakes his head. “Having ISO accreditation shouldn’t make a company more rigid,” he says. “It just means you have to define how you are going to address something, communicate it, and then prove that you’ve done it the way you said you were going to.”

The next phase of growth will come from effectively taking more control of the intellectual property that SWF create. “IP can also be the methodology,,” explains Hornsby. “We’ve started with IP which enables government agencies manage their commitments under the EU emissions trading scheme, IP we had originally designed for a customer. This proved to be something of a learning curve because we then found ourselves having to work out how to sell a product not a service.” One which was smoothed by appointing a product manager.

Bolt-on growth isn’t on the agenda. “An acquisition would have to take us into a different sector or geography,

of a printed page and see extra content on their handset. This might be a moving version of the static image on the paper or a video.

“Augmented reality literally brings print to life, and the data created from using it is invaluable. From every image you can see how many interactions there have been, how many are repeated and what links people have clicked.”

Location advantageisn’t hyperbole

When Peter Hornsby sold his company based in Leicester Square, it was always his intention to start another business. But not in London. With co-founder Steve Elliott, he decided on Woking because of its proximity to the capital by rail and to the airports. It’s a choice he’d make again, over twenty years on. And making reference to the communication hub characteristics of the town isn’t hyperbole. “Part of a tender which we won from government included details of our ability to service the UK from our location,” Hornsby explains.

The independent IT consultancy has a voraciousness for designing software using Microsoft, Oracle, and open source platforms, in particular for the energy and environmental markets.

And despite embracing managed services and project management, some things haven’t changed since the company began in 1992. “Whether IT evolves or goes through revolutionary change, the issues relating to the design and building of applications software are fundamentally the same,” suggests Hornsby. “It all boils down to making a fundamental change to a customer’s IT architecture as comfortable for them as possible.

“I’ve been fortunate in having worked on what I call business and mission critical software, such as the control of the landing lights at Heathrow Airport, or the estate agency chain where a problem with their website would result in the loss of enquiries and sales opportunities. The point I am making is that while all our customers will have service level agreements with us, what we have to do is ensure that if something should go wrong, it’s fixed as close to immediately as possible. Engineers like building and fixing things, and I use the term software engineer proudly, because we applied it to describe our work before it was fashionable.”

And SWF have a lot of them. Total staff numbers have arced from 120 to 200 (with sixty based in India) over the last year. “The challenge is being able to put in the right management structure to cope with growth, because this is uncharted territory for most SME owners,” suggests Hornsby. “It includes being able to get people to realise that they have to report directly to a line manager rather than to a director as before. We also need to know how to strike a balance in where we invest within the business.”

Certainly a growing international dimension can make for some interesting conversations. A project undertaken


minutes and you can be there in just over twenty minutes,” observes Kirkpatrick. “I think Woking Borough Council have a remarkably commercial outlook; swapping land for example, to initiate improvements to the road network.”

For distributor read exclusive club, because Wick Hill have a portfolio of just thirteen or so products, mainly in IP infrastructure and convergence. And there’s one reason why the £100million+ turnover business with 150 staff is so selective. If Queen Mary had Calais inscribed on her heart, then reputation is Kilpatrick’s mantra.

“A distributor only has one attribute, which is reputation,” he maintains. “What we deliver works and we will provide all the support that our channel partners need to take the product to market. Products relating to security, performance, and management address areas of complexity where users need help. What we do isn’t unique, but it’s pretty exceptional”

At least once a day something new will cross his desk. “We get to see a lot of great technology, but is there a niche for it and will that niche grow? We’re market makers, and if we can’t see that the product can move the market, then we won’t play,” Kilpatrick explains. “Some will have interesting components, but our business is growing a proven product, not starting from zero.”

But he’s loathe to see potential wasted, which is why he set up an incubator for such fledgling products. The Wick Hill Select Programme isn’t in itself a profit centre for the group, so the potential vendor has to have ambition as well as product attributes. “They have to be committed, and demonstrate a desire to win,” says Kilpatrick. “If, for example, they’re an American software developer looking for a European landing zone, and they’re happy for their product just to sit in a catalogue, then we’re not the right fit for them.

“We’ll provide marketing and support and exposure to a subset of our client base for an agreed cost, which means we are able to filter those who are really committed. We take a reduced percentage while they are in the select programme. Of course the alternative is for them to find a way of reaching our portfolio entry threshold themselves and come back when they do. Our goal when we take on a product is to invest strongly in it in the expectation of profits from year two.

“One of the risks is that when we make the investment to develop a niche product, the vendor comes to the attention of a Citrix for example and gets taken over. Against that, we’ve been working with WatchGuard since 1997.”

In recent years there has been considerable consolidation of distribution channels, and rather than becoming lost in 1000-page catalogues, more vendors are looking at the Wick Hill model. “We could possibly go up to twenty products,” says Kilpatrick cautiously. “We’ve turned down what could have resulted in £10million of business which was offered to us over the last year, because working with the vendors would have meant adjusting our standards.”

What Wick Hill look for are new niches as well as for products. “The challenge is not just finding and developing the right niche, but identifying the right time, which is when

otherwise we would be buying more capacity which wouldn’t necessarily be the right fit culturally,” says Hornsby.

That said, a company’s ability to attract IT talent can be cyclical. “Software engineers in the City think about looking at a better lifestyle in the south when the economy is in recession, but when demand in London picks up they are attracted back by a salary differential which can be as much as £10k a year,” muses Hornsby. “The price they pay is being tied to the job twenty-four-seven, but Generation Y can be quite happy to work all the hours for a specific period of time in order to be able to put down a deposit on a flat. That said, we attracted a software support engineer from the Thames Valley for less money because she liked the people who interviewed her and was drawn to the variety of work she would be doing here.”

Staff approved of the move

Market research company GfK moved to Woking town centre last year, the motivation being their German parent wanted the two parts of their UK operation to merge into one building. In the event, large enough premises could not be found so the two divisions continue to live separately, one in Woking, the other remaining in London.

The criteria required the new location to be close to a mainline station and have easy access to motorways. Woking scored on both counts, says Shani Orchard, their human resources and facilities director. “Staff approved of the move, and some have moved to the town since the relocation, she says. “The offering is getting better with more shops such as Superdry, and places to eat like Carluccio’s and Tante Marie, the culinary academy co-owned by Gordon Ramsay.”

Orchard lives in Woking and cites a low crime rate as an attraction. As a member of Woking’s Street Angels, an organisation which patrols the streets at night offering pastoral care, she says statistically crime has fallen significantly over the last few years.

One wrinkle though is the shortage of car parking. The Duke’s Court building occupied by GfK has only twenty-eight spaces for 170 staff and the company has had to bite the bullet of paying for staff to use the adjacent Toys R Us car park. Her solution would be a park and ride system, which could enable shoppers to leave their cars at home, freeing up all-day parking spaces for workers.

Arrived after making acquisition

When Ian Kilpatrick, chairman and managing director of distributor Wick Hill Group says he understands the trials and tribulations of being an IT supplier, it’s because that’s how his company started.

Wick Hill Group arrived in Woking via Wokingham, Ashford, and Egham, as a consequence of buying out a competitor. “There’s a train from here to London every five


What he would really like to see if even more business community and council collaboration. “What about the creation of Digital Woking,” he suggests. “We could turn Woking into a digital hub, with the creation of a dedicated incubator which could be set up without too much money. I would far rather network with people in a similar line of work, even if they are competitors, than through traditional networking groups and business associations.”

Company could be anywhere

As a company that does 90% of its business overseas, specialist software supplier Format International could be located just about anywhere. The fact that it has chosen to remain based in Woking says a lot about the town’s attractions, says MD Merryl Webster.

The independent company, which is the global leader in producing software for the animal feed formulation and other industries, is in Woking for purely historical reasons: its founders lived in the area when they set the business up in 1980.

“We’ve never seen a reason to move,” says Webster. “Woking suits us very well. It’s convenient for the staff and the rail network is absolutely superb. It’s easy to get out of the town and into attractive countryside, which staff like, and it’s convenient for Heathrow and Gatwick, which is important as we do a lot of travelling.”

Interestingly, Webster says the availability of “extremely good” telecoms and broadband in the town means travel has become progressively less important. “Twenty years ago we had no option but to travel to see customers but we do fewer international visits these days, as we can use the internet for meetings and supporting clients.”

A real sense of camaraderie

“There’s a real community feel to the town and a real sense of camaraderie among the people who work and do business here,” says Chris Shrubb, founding partner of accountants and business advisers Hamlyns. “I can’t go out at lunchtime without bumping into half a dozen people I know. You don’t get that in central London.

“What is interesting is that many Woking-based businesses do comparatively little business in the town. Woking is ideally located for international businesses. because of its excellent transport links, so companies aren’t restricted to fishing in a relatively restricted local pond – they can fish in much larger oceans.

“From time to time we’ve thought about also opening a satellite office in London, but really the cost wouldn’t justify it and there really isn’t the need to have one. You could say that businesses based in Woking have a presence in London, since they can be there within half an hour.”

the market senses that it needs it,” explains Kilkpatrick. “We got that right with virtualisation security. With authentication software we were too early, which meant we did all the groundwork and then there was a gap before revenue generation.”

The group has an international presence, acquiring a German distribution business in 1992, and for a time had a joint venture with Telenor, the Norwegian telecom company. “We’ve contemplated further geographical expansion,” muses Kilpatrick, “but given that we grew 38% last year, it’s not necessarily our top priority.

“It’s interesting because we’re in a zone where competitors have been growing by acquisition rather than organically. Yes, we could be five times bigger than we are today, but we would be a different business and with smaller margins. We’ve taken the organic route because it means we can maintain our culture and our reputation.

“We’re a tall poppy in terms of a company looking to make an acquisition in our market, and arguably, as every business has its price, we’ve been for sale since 1976 when we started! But we thrive in a world of challenge and change, and we’re excited by finding a new niche or product. We review everything we do in eighteen-month cycles, asking ourselves the question ‘why this way’? It’s essential, because distribution has the smallest margin in the supply chain.”

Commute contributes to balance

A “gorgeous” journey to work is how Giles Guest describes his commute to his offices in Woking, cycling mainly on dedicated tracks or through woods. “My work-life balance is great,” he says. “And if I drive I’m just nine minutes from home so I can work until late and still be back in time to put the children to bed.”

Guest is founder of digital marketing agency Enhance Media, which is based close to Woking station. He was just twenty-three when he set up one of the first online recruitment businesses in Europe, selling the south London-based business when it was turning over £2million and employing forty. He used the proceeds to start Enhance in 2007, with a focus on helping clients to use the internet to recruit more effectively. Having already moved home to the village of Ottershaw, he wanted the business to be based locally – and the lower costs of office accommodation in Woking compared to further in to London were a draw.

The business has since grown 80% year-on-year and if it continues to do so, Guest thinks it will outgrow its present offices in a couple of years. But he has no plans to leave Woking. “A real advantage with Woking,” he says, “is the rail link to London. It takes me less time to get to London clients from here than it did from Putney.”

Guest says another benefit is the town’s New Victoria Theatre. “It’s a huge bonus – West End shows and Glyndebourne Touring Opera for half the price and double the comfort,” he enthuses.

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