How to floor the opposition

Published in the Financial Times, December 2007

Dawn Gibbins turned her father’s scientific ideas into an innovative business.  She tells Peter March about the people and ideas that helped make it a market leader

If Dawn Gibbins says she would like you do not be alarmed.  She is simply trying to sell you her products.

Ms Gibbins is chairman of Flowcrete, a Cheshire-based company that is one of Europe’s biggest producers of specialist, resin-based floors.  Sitting in her office in Flowcrete’s modest Chester HQ, she says the biggest attributes she brings to the business are “enthusiasm and passion” for selling Flowcrete’s products and encouraging innovative thinking among the company’s 350 strong workforce.

After leaving school without A-levels, Ms Gibbins did menial jobs, such as picking fruit, before setting up Flowcrete in 1982 with her father, Peter.  Since then the company has expanded to expected sales this year of about £412m with pre-tax profits of roughly £3m.  The company has eight plants around the world, with overseas markets accounting for about two-thirds of revenues.  Some 250 of its employees are outside the UK, in countries from Malaysia to South Africa.  Flowcrete floors are installed – normally in commercial premises such as offices or shops by laying a screed of chemicals that sets in a specific manner to provide one of the company’s 200 or so flooring types.

Flamboyant and enthusiastic, Ms Gibbins is hardly shy about publicising herself.  Her personal website features a picture of the Flowcrete chairman showing a “V” for victory sign, while describing her as the “gusto Guru of industry”.

But she is also quick to direct attention to others who have been important in guiding the company’s development.

Her father, an industrial chemist who died in 1993, provided the scientific core of the company.  “He knew a lot about a whole range of areas, from how to make the elastomer joints for bridge decks, to what you need for the anti-static layers for carpets.  It was thanks to him we turned a lot of scientific knowledge into a business”.

Ms Gibbins says a steadying influence comes from Mark Greaves, Flowcrete’s managing director, who is also her husband.  He joined Flowcrete in 1989 from Royal Dutch/Shell to work in sales, later being promoted to his current position, and along the way marrying his boss.  Mr Greaves owns 30 per cent of Flowcrete with Ms Gibbins owing 58 per cent.

“I think Mark and I make a brilliant combination” says Ms Gibbins.  “I have a lot of ideas for doing new things.  Mark says to me that out of perhaps 10 ideas, I have a good chance of doing two of them really well, and that I’d better pick which ones they are going to be.  I provide excitement while he’s good at compliance”.

Ms Gibbins also mentions civil servants and ministers at the much-criticised Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (formerly the Department of Trade and Industry), particularly over the Manufacturing Advisory Service, a scheme that provides new ideas for smaller companies.  She says the scheme has helped Flowcrete organise its operations better and devise a clearer sales strategy - for instance over deciding which products to target towards certain types of customer.  Ms Gibbins particularly praises the self-effacing Stephen Timms, a minister who she says has championed the role of smaller companies in various government jobs, “I call him sensational Stephen” she says.

Still more surprising may be the final person Ms Gibbins singles out:  Dennis Humphries, managing director of Candy Creative, a small local advertising and design company.  “I’ve known Dennis since 1989.  Before I’d ever met him he sent a champagne lunch to my office saying it was from a secret admirer.  That was a way of introducing himself to me and I’ve been using him as a consultant ever since”.

The main thing Mr Humphries did in recent years, says Ms Gibbins, was in designing a new logo for the company – at first apparently an almost trifling job, but one that put the business on a new path.  By 2005, says Ms Gibbins “We had bought a lot of companies…. and had difficulty integrating the.  The company was too complex; we had too many products and too many brands.  I asked Dennis to design a new logo.  What he came up with was a red wavy line.  Mark said “We can’t have this – we do flat floors”. 

“It was one of the few occasions when Mark and I had a real disagreement but I made sure I won. The new logo – and a manual on how to use it – cost us only £5,000 but set us in a new direction…..We cut out a lot of products and simplified our approach, both in terms of internal organisations and how we approached our customers”.

Many of the companies Flowcrete bought had continued to use their own brands and design motifs.  “With the new design it was easier to brand everything the company did under the Flowcrete name and work much better as one team” says Ms Gibbins.  “The new logo also encouraged the establishment of collaborative working groups across the company.

Maintaining about 10 different brands until 2005 had led to one of Flowcrete’s biggest mistakes, says Ms Gibbins.  In 1995, it bought Isocrete, a UK flooring company with a good reputation in high-quality commercial flooring.

“We were so impressed with the Isocrete name that we used it as a brand for a lot of our general commercial flooring, sending confusing messages to our customers about what Flowcrete stood for” she says, “Now the Isocrete name has been dropped as a brand, with better results for the company as a whole, although the name continues in use to describe a range of products sold under the overall Flowcrete rubric.

A more coherent approach resulted in better commercial performance and higher profits, says Ms Gibbins.  From breaking even in 2004, on revenue of about £35m, the company made a pre-tax profit of £1.1m in 2006.  The earnings figure for 2007 looks like being well ahead of the £2.5m targeted at the start of the year, while Ms Gibbins is aiming by 2010 for pre-tax profits of £5m on sales of £50m.

Until now, Flowcrete has relied for finance for expansion on band loans, which over the past few years have reached a peak of £3m.

Would she ever consider taking in a large injection of outside equity, perhaps through a public listing?

Ms Gibbins shows a rare flash of indecision “I do dream of floating the company, because that would be a sign that we had made it as a business.

“But I’d be worried that if we brought in a lot of outside shareholders, I’d no longer be my own boss and we’d lose some of our entrepreneurial spirit” she says.

Ground rules laid out for an expanding manufacturer

Dawn Gibbins, chairman of Flowcrete, the company she founded with her father in 1982, suggest some tips for an expanding business;

When acquiring companies, be ruthless about jettisoning brand names that detract from the coherence of the parent company.  We made one of our biggest mistakes by keeping the name of a company we had acquired (Isocrete) which led to confusion among customers”.

Invest in new technologies to improve produces

Pay attention to services as well as manufacturing, on the grounds that many industrial companies are selling projects as much as products.  “I don’t like spending a lot of time saying ‘rah rah, we’re a manufacturer’.  The important thing is to make the product effectively and then deliver it in an effective way to the customer, which means behaving like a service company”.

Take advantage of government schemes to help improve strategy and performance – they may be more useful than you think.

Blend excitement with pragmatism “In the case of Flowcrete, I provide the excitement, while a steadying influence comes from the managing director (Mark Greaves, Ms Gibbins husband). “I start things; Mark finishes them off”.