From one man with a van to £8 million turnover
Jon Neill started Sportsafe UK from his garage in Great Horkesley, Essex in 1997. Sportsafe UK is a service and maintenance company for sports and fitness equipment. In 2009, he had a wake-up call when the bank manager contacted him about late payment and Jon decided he needed help.
We started like many small businesses: my wife helped by answering the phone and I would juggle between working on the road as an engineer and the promotion of the company. After twelve months we were awarded our first council contract of 50 schools. Once we had won our first tender, the second and third soon followed and we started to employ staff.
At this stage, the business began to grow at an uncontrollable rate. I was working over ninety hours a week with no holidays but profits remained low. The mistakes I made recruiting some employees meant the culture was also out of control with the staff calling the shots and we very nearly lost the business at this point. I had a wake up call when the bank manager called me in, the tax office were chasing for payments, the staff were playing up, and most areas of the business had little control or planning.
It was at this point, in 2009, that my accountant introduced me to my local ActionCOACH.
We went back to basics – why did we set up, what’s the purpose, simple job descriptions and what did we expect team members to do, where did we have skills gaps and who to bring in to help me free up myself?
In year one 80 per cent of my staff left the company as they were unable or unwilling to change to a more positive working culture. It was then that I started to rebuild Sportsafe beginning with the foundations and the core of the business.
When Sportsafe began, the largest competitor in the UK at that time held just 19 contracts. We now service in excess of 18,000 individual sites across the UK which are annual repeat customers. That’s amazing considering it all started with one man and a van in a garage. It was not always this way and since our involvement with our coach new strategies and procedures implemented have seen the business flourish to its current form.
After seven years of business coaching, in 2016 we will turnover £8 million and we now employ a team of seventy. It really is fantastic progress considering we turned over £45,000 in our first year after the bank had denied us a £4,000 loan for a van as they thought the business wouldn’t work!
