Reach and Rescue won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for its life-saving water rescue system, a unique innovation supported by GC Business Growth Hub’s Manufacturing Service.

Based in Wigan, Reach and Rescue is a business that truly makes a difference to people’s lives. Its unique long-reach telescopic pole system is used by 80% of UK Fire and Rescue services – and in over 50 countries worldwide – for water rescue operations. The lightweight, super-strong carbon fibre poles extend up to 20 metres, enabling rescuers to retrieve casualties quickly without compromising their own safety.

Shortly after celebrating its tenth year of helping to save lives, in April 2021 Reach and Rescue won royal recognition for its achievements with a prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation. This is the highest business accolade that can be bestowed upon a UK company, and gives Reach and Rescue the ability to use the esteemed Queen’s Award emblem for the next five years.

The company has worked closely with several of the Hub’s services since 2018, including specialist manufacturing advice to free up capacity and support ongoing innovations.

Supporting innovation

Part of the ingenuity behind Reach and Rescue’s telescopic pole system is that it can be used with more than 20 interchangeable end devices, offering rescuers solutions for a range of different scenarios, such as hooks, grapplers and floats.

In 2019, the business identified an opportunity to add a retractable line feature to the poles. To do this, it first needed to design and assemble a small batch of prototypes to test their quality and functionality.

As Jo Taylor MBE, Reach and Rescue’s Director, explains: “The retractable line is a little more complex than some of our other attachments. It’s quite intricate so we needed outside support to develop the right components.”

The Hub’s Manufacturing Service was on hand to help. The project was eligible for a grant from the Manufacturing Growth Fund, which helped to fund the design and production of 3D printed samples for seven mould tools needed for the components.

Once satisfied, Reach and Rescue was able to proceed with the manufacture of the moulds, enabling prototypes to be developed. All in all, it took just a few months to go from conception to full series production.

Lean manufacturing

Following the development of the retractable line feature, Reach and Rescue got to work on its next innovation – a new variant of the telescopic pole fitted with a tranverse clamp.

To free up the capacity needed to add the new product line to Reach and Rescue’s production mix, Manufacturing Advisor Martin Hyman advised the team on how to improve its processes through lean manufacturing techniques.

“We learnt a lot from Martin’s support,” Jo says. “We had quadrupled the size of our facilities and he really helped the team to embed lean processes and ensure we were as efficient as possible.

“When he spoke to the production operatives making the poles, he brought things to the table and came up with solutions we hadn’t previously considered. I’m not from a manufacturing background, so having a sounding board when we’re having frustrations with something is really useful.”

Bouncing back

Like many businesses, Reach and Rescue was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency services had to shift their priorities and sales to the maritime sector were also affected.

In response, the business has set out to diversify its customer base and move into new markets. A £2,900 grant from Greater Manchester’s Small Business Recovery Grant programme in 2020 helped to hire a videographer to aid the new marketing push.

“We wanted to do more promotions into new industries to help us bounce back from COVID, and the videos are a big part of that,” Jo explains. “We commissioned a number of videos for our products and it’s still an ongoing project; we have new products in the works and Portsafe, our public access water rescue system, is going from strength to strength.”

The Queen’s Award win in April 2021 came at the perfect time, with the prestige associated with the scheme expected to help grow the business going forward.

“The Queen’s Award really puts the icing on the cake for us and rubber stamps what we’ve done for the last ten years. We’ve brought a product from scratch into the world, and it’s been recognised for what it was designed to do, which is save lives.”

The Hub’s support has played an important role in the journey, Jo says.

“The support we’ve benefitted from has just helped with making sure we’re always innovating and developing as a business. It’s not just the manufacturing support, we’ve taken full advantage of many of the Hub’s services, all the way back to when we were encouraged to enter Venturefest North West’s Innovation Showcase in 2018. The support we’ve had from the Access to Finance team, International Trade and more recently the Global Scale Up programme has also been really valuable.”

This article was first published on the GC Business Growth Hub website. GC Business Growth Hub is part-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of a project designed to help ambitious SME businesses achieve growth and increase employment in Greater Manchester. The Hub is also supported by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Greater Manchester local authorities.

Peter Allen, Director of Bury-based waste management firm ISM Waste, shares his thoughts about the future of waste and how ISM has always kept ahead of the environmental agenda.

Founded back in 1965 by Peter’s parents with reputedly £9 to their name, ISM Waste has developed from a small scrap metal operation into a leading regional waste management and recycling company that employs 45 people.

Thanks to state-of-the-art facilities following a multi-million-pound investment, ISM recycles 90% of all the waste it collects. The remaining waste is transformed into refuse-derived fuel (RDF) to be recovered in waste-to-energy plants.

The company has been working closely with Environmental Business Advisor Rebecca Chedd to maximise the energy efficiency of its site, which already incorporates a rooftop solar PV system. In 2020, ISM received an Energy Efficiency Grant towards the cost of upgrading lighting across its site to LEDs, achieving annual cost saving of over £13,700.

ISM was founded over half a century ago. When did recycling and sustainability become a key part of the business?

It’s been there in one form or another right from the beginning. When my dad set the business up, he was effectively dismantling old machinery from the industrial mills that were being decommissioned around Lancashire. He passed on what he could recover to scrap metal smelters and foundries over in Sheffield. We now call this ‘recycling’, but back then that word didn’t even exist!

As the business grew, my parents spotted an opportunity to move into general waste as well. Before long, they realised that this waste, like the scrap metal, wasn’t just waste – it was made up of materials of varying value that could be extracted. So in the late 1970s we moved to the site we still have today and began focusing on materials recycling, which was a very bold move at the time because landfill was so cheap.

Mum and dad could see what was coming. In 1996, the government introduced the Landfill Tax. Despite being a slow burner at first, the cost of landfilling gradually rose from around £7 a tonne to the £96.70 it is today. So we were ahead of the game.

How does the business operate today?

In 2000, we began significantly expanding our facilities after recognising that we needed to up our game even more. We invested around £5 million to create a fully mechanised plant that could capture more recycling and prepare the rest to be recovered as energy.

I describe it as a ‘waste transformation factory’ – we take a raw ingredient in the form of waste that would otherwise go to landfill and turn it into a useable commodity.

What measures have you taken to improve the environmental impact of your operations?

We installed solar PV on our rooftop in 2015 which generates a comparable amount of energy to our electrical use on-site, so in effect our electricity usage is carbon neutral with any excess generation going back onto the national grid as green energy. It’s all cleaver stuff and a smarter way of working.

More recently, we’ve had the benefit of the Growth Hub’s input to change all our lighting to LEDs, which turned out to be a really good energy reduction project thanks to the grant we received.

We’ve also taken action to reduce diesel emissions from our trucks. We discovered many years ago that our trucks spent quite a lot of time idling on customer sites. So we spoke to Volvo, who installed technology that cut the ignition after a given period of time. That alone saved us around £25,000 a year in fuel, and we’re still enjoying that saving today. Start-stop technology is normal nowadays, but it’s another example where we were ahead of the game before the millennium beckoned.

We’re also passionate about reusing waste wherever we can. Several years before we built our new facility, a local customer told me they had thousands of Teflon coated solid wood panels that they needed to recycle. I knew I was going to need wall protection in the new site, so I asked the business to hold onto them. When the time came, we designed a solution to bolt the panels together to create interlocking wall protectors that we use all the way around the inside of our building. That saved us at least £25,000 in concrete costs. So it’s not just about recycling; we’re always looking to reuse resources when we can.

How are you responding to Greater Manchester’s forthcoming Clean Air Zone? 

We identified three years ago that we needed to invest in upgrading our fleet ahead of air quality requirements being brought in. It’s going to cost us around £1.5 million to bring our trucks up to the required emissions standard, but it’s the right thing to do and the penalty of not doing so would be significant.

We’ve had new trucks on order for the last two or three years and only received the first one recently, which just shows you always need to be thinking ahead. If you’re not in early, you’re going to be behind the queue, and that goes for the environmental agenda in general.

What other environmental improvements are you exploring next?

The tax increase for red diesel is going to add considerable costs to our business, so in the long-term we are looking at options to electrify our plant. The next step for us is to expand our solar array, which is something we’re exploring with Rebecca at the Hub.

The work is never done; there is always something new to look at, like whether we’re wasting energy on compressed air. Again, we benefitted from the Hub on that with a compressed air leak survey. I’m also keen to explore rainwater harvesting on our roof for washing our trucks.

How useful has the Hub’s support been?

Rebecca has been absolutely fantastic. The support we received in calculating the energy and carbon reduction of the LED lighting investment and what it would mean in real terms, as well as the grant funding, really put the case forward. Without the Hub, we wouldn’t have got that over the line.

We’re certainly not finished there. I’m looking forward to speaking to Rebecca about expanding our solar, electrifying our plant and looking at our carbon footprint. We have to rely on expert help from the likes of Rebecca and her connections to decide what the best options are.

There’s a wealth of knowledge and connections to call upon. You could do a hell of a lot worse than picking the phone up and having a chat with Rebecca about what you are thinking of doing.

The waste industry faces a lot of challenges as we transition to a sustainable, zero carbon economy. What will we have to respond to over the coming years?

It’s quite clear to me that waste producers and the waste industry have to change. Increasingly, we’re going to see that waste producers and their suppliers will have to make sure they’re not using materials in a way that prevents reuse or recycling.

Take laminated plastics. We cannot recycle a product that is made of two different plastics stuck onto each other. We’ve got to overcome these challenges in society to ensure that materials can all go back into the system. We have to start seeing waste as a resource.

No business can afford to be a commercial dinosaur; everybody has got to play a part. If you don’t, you’re going to be penalised for it. I’d like to think we are playing a part in that shift with our humble efforts here in Ramsbottom. I try to see things that are coming, like my parents did, and promote that mindset to our customers. When we all start thinking like that, we’re getting into a better place.

This article was first published on the GC Business Growth Hub website. GC Business Growth Hub is part-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of a project designed to help ambitious SME businesses achieve growth and increase employment in Greater Manchester. The Hub is also supported by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Greater Manchester local authorities.

If there’s one thing that no business has enough of, it’s time. The pandemic pushed us all to our breaking points in every imaginable way. We struggled to make our budgets stretch to get us through to the end of each month. We had to find a way to accommodate our employees when they needed to take time away from work. We had to figure out how we were going to juggle our personal responsibilities with our professional ones. At certain points we had to learn how we were going to work from home while home-schooling our kids. It’s been a long stretch of gritting our teeth and looking for ways to keep moving forward.

Now that we have a few more reasons to be cheerful and we’re starting to think more positively about our futures, we still need to look for ways that we can make our businesses more agile. There is no telling what the future will hold, and we all need to be using this period of greater breathing room to think carefully about how we can be more resilient in future. Creating more time for your business will stand you in good stead for whatever is coming on the horizon, and here are just a few of the ways that you can take back control of your days.

Start By Getting Organised

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. If you are looking for ways to improve your timekeeping, you need to start by getting organised. Create a schedule for each day and look for those tasks that have turned into drains on your time. Look at what each employee and colleague is doing with their day and ask them to create a schedule of their own. Look for opportunities to share tasks and look to see if there is any way that you can lighten the load for yourself or anyone else. Once you have a crystal-clear idea of how everyone is spending their days, you can start improving efficiency.

Make Sure Everyone Is Communicating

Maintaining open lines of communication has been one of the biggest challenges for all businesses during the course of the pandemic. Once everyone started working from home, we became increasingly reliant on unreliable ways of checking in. We spent a lot of time merely hoping that everyone was getting on with their tasks because the alternative was to spend the whole time worrying.

If you want to make sure that everyone is using their time as productively as possible, you need to find the happy medium between leaving your employees to get on with their work and making sure that they are actually doing so. You don’t want to be hovering over their shoulders all the time, but you also need to know that the work is getting done. Start by establishing communication channels for each of your employees and set regular check in times. Ask for status updates at regular intervals.

Invest In Software That Saves You Time

Saving time doesn’t just have to be eating lunch at your desk. Over the last few years, we’re seeing the amazing results that have come from businesses utilising software to cut out a lot of time-consuming tasks. A new platform can help you with your HR management, making it easier for employees to register things like absence and sick days and leaving the HR team with more time to deal with the more important issues.

It can streamline your employee performance management, offering real time performance feedback and logging achievements met for quarterly employee reviews. It can also, as we mentioned in the point above, help you to establish clear and open lines of communication between management and employees to ensure that tasks are being completed on time and that progress is visible to everyone. If you want to make this investment, StaffCircle can work with you to customise their multi-layered platform to help your business be more efficient and stay focused on the big picture.

Trust Your Employees To Know What They’re Doing

As we mentioned earlier, there is a fine line between making sure that your teams are getting everything done and getting so involved in their workdays that they actually start falling behind. A common mistake that a lot of businesses made in the early days of lockdown was that they overcompensated for the lack of in-office communication. It was driven by panic, and that’s how you end up with an hour-long check-in meeting in the morning, an hour-long wrap-up meeting in the evening, and several video calls throughout the day to confirm that what was talked about in the morning meeting was getting done.

Now that UK restrictions are lifting, a lot of businesses are thinking of returning to the office in the near future. Many others will continue to work remotely. Either way, one of the best ways that you can improve your efficiency is to think carefully about how much time you need to spend talking to your teams, and how much time would be gained by letting them do their jobs.

If you’re someone who tends to read article headlines rather than their detail, you will have been impressed to see the UK strike trade agreements in principle with India and Australia so far in 2021.

In particular, the proposed agreement with Australia has been celebrated as a huge success,  after five years of tentative discussions following the Brexit referendum vote in June 2016.

However, there are significant questions about the true content and impact of these trade deals. So, are they what they seem and what exactly do they mean for the GBP?

The Deals Struck so Far

A number of trade agreements have been confirmed so far since the UK’s formal exit from the EU, although it should be said that many of these represent a continuation of the terms agreed as part of the single bloc.

Even the Indian trade deal has simply looked to remove selected tariffs (on both imports and exports) and build on the existing £23 billion trade between the two nations, although the recently confirmed partnership has proposed to double the value of UK-India trade by the year 2030.

The recent trade deal with Australia appears to be a far more comprehensive deal, while it’s certainly significant for its historic symbolism. Currently an Agreement in Principle that comprises more than 1,200 pages, it’s expected to be finalised shortly before being rolled out in 2022.

While the UK has been reluctant to release full details of the agreement, it has been confirmed that tariffs will be removed on up to £4.3 billion worth of UK exports, with all tariffs on cars and whisky to be eliminated immediately.

Similarly, the deal will liberalise Australian imports into the UK, with 99% of Aussie goods including Australian wine entering the region duty free from 2022 onwards.

In ten years time, it’s thought that all tariffs on Australian beef and sheep meat (which is central to the commodity-driven Aussie economy) will be removed completely within 10 years. This is perhaps the single biggest headline to emerge from the agreement, and one that has caused some initial debate amongst economists.

Are These Deals Good News for the Economy?

So far, the news of the deal has yet to impact the British pound positively, with the MT4 platform reporting a sustained decline in the value of the GBP/USD and the depreciation of the pound against the Aussie dollar.

While this trend is being underpinned by the relative strength of the dollar and a new wave of Covid-19 infections in the UK, some have also argued that it has more to do with the actual detail of the trade deal struck with Australia.

Certainly, initial analysis of the deal has suggested that this represents a significant win for Australia rather than the UK, while Aussie consumers will also benefit from cheaper products almost immediately.

From an economic perspective, it may not even deliver the 0.02% boost to UK GDP that was forecast before the final deal was struck, with some suggesting that the true financial impact could be closer to zero.

Not only this, but the future influx of tariff-free agricultural produce into the UK could decimate the farming industry on these shores, while lowering food standards and taking another slice out of the national GDP.

This has yet to be seen, of course, but there’s no doubt that this and similar post-Brexit trade deals may not necessarily be as impressive as the government is currently suggesting.