Business Fact or Fiction? – Carters Journey

I thought inheritances were supposed to make you happy but the one from my granddad seemed to be a poisoned chalice!

He had always had a soft spot for me, being his first grandson, and on many occasions I had heard him speak about the engineering business he owned. I have to say from what I heard he only ever talked about the problems it had. Now he had, following his death, left the business to me. What should I do?

Sell it?
Close it?
Try to make a go of it?

It seemed that I had little relevant experience being a project manager in a large company. I had a family and we were always short of cash. So making a go of it and making some money along the way seemed attractive. Anyway who would buy it? It seemed like closing it might be a lost opportunity and worst still might cost some money.

Granddad was a wise old bird he new I’d have to have a go but there were all those problems he described. I’d heard him say:

Customers were always complaining about quality and service – unreliable seems to cover it

• The business seemed to be proverbial sponge in terms of cash
• Employees were always moaning and having time off.
• The place was a mess – very untidy didn’t do it justice I remember him saying once.
• The competition seemed unknown as did what the business was or should be good at
• Everything seemed a surprise
• Getting and keeping the right people was difficult

I’d read some books and had always been logical, practical and committed. How difficult could it be to make it a success story?

So what had I inherited? It was a small engineering company employing approximately 68 people with a turnover of about £6.0m pa. Its work centred on subcontract and a few in house designed products. At best its performance was break even and I always remember Granddad saying it was like a sponge when it came to cash. So there should be plenty to go at with the goal of making money. That was a bit glib I guess as well as making money the business needed to grow so that I could give up the day job and concentrate all my efforts on my inheritance.

My first problem was nothing to do with business I’d inherited I’d got a fulltime job so how was I going to generate the time to improve my new business? Fortunately my current employer was going through hard times and hence making employees redundant. Eventually I plucked up courage and went to my boss about working part time. To my surprise he accepted I would work half days with my salary pro-rata.

So to the problems of my inherited company. Where to start?

If you want to read more chapters of Carters experiences we’ll include them in future website up dates. We generally plan to do updates once a quarter

Written by EMS