Richard Burbidge is a brand in the family owned Archwood Group, part of a stable of brands that manufacture and distribute wooden products to the home improvement sector. Richard Burbidge focuses on timber home improvements, particularly around staircase components, but also mouldings for doors and windows, picture rails, decking accessories and more. Predominantly, these products are sold through the British DIY retail and staircase manufacturing sectors.
“Richard Burbidge, alongside other brands in the Archwood Group, is a value-based business,” explains Josh Burbidge, Managing Director of Richard Burbidge. “That means we run the business according to five core values.”
Those values are “Reputation”; a commitment to promoting the company’s market-leading brands through product and service innovation. “Responsibility”; leading the market in terms of sustainability by consistently reducing the firm’s carbon footprint. “Stability”; generating a fair return from sales of the company’s products while reinvesting a third of its post-tax profits into enhancing its products and services. “Transformation”; the ongoing search for new IT solutions and machinery to improve the firm’s capabilities and output quality. The final but important tenet of Richard Burbidge’s values is “Evolution”; a drive to develop the company’s culture towards becoming an even more collaborative team with a positive, proactive and problem-solving attitude.
Making the Right Steps
To build that team, Richard Burbidge recruits locally through its two offices in Livingston and Chirk in North Wales.
“We use a combination of three different recruiting methods,” Burbidge tells us. “We use word-of-mouth, engage with our contacts locally and pick up a number of people through local advertising, and use specialist recruitment agencies.”
The company also engages with local school outreach programs, supporting schemes such as interview training sessions for school leavers to grow awareness of the brand.
Meanwhile, staff within the company are supported with regular appraisals that look at their performance and even happiness in their roles while rewarding high-performing individuals and providing training programs suited to the requirements of the business.
But Richard Burbidge does not just take care of its employees’ professional wellbeing.
“We have faced challenges in terms of our people’s mental wellbeing and to help with that we have introduced a training course with qualified mental wellbeing first aiders,” Burbidge says. “We have a number of those first aiders in the business to help people through any challenges they might face.”
That support has been particularly valuable in the light of the recent cost-of-living crisis, where as well as supporting staff through salary increases and a one-off payment, the company has also worked with local water and energy suppliers, as well as the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, to help people manage their finances better.
The Next Step
Richard Burbidge has invested in and taken care of itself and its people through numerous challenges, including the Covid-19 crisis and the recent rise in energy prices – a particularly tough challenge for a manufacturing company.
“As a manufacturer, energy is a large input cost,” Burbidge says. “We installed a solar panel array of 2,600 solar panels at the end of 2022 to reduce our energy costs and increase the amount of energy produced on-site – about 40% of the energy we require. Alongside that, we have worked out a way of investing in our extraction facility, which makes up 75% of our energy usage, and found ways to bring down the energy required to run that facility.”
Richard Burbidge has also looked to make changes to the customer base it serves.
“We have also been diversifying our customer base. Historically we have been focused on a small number of large customers, which is concerning from a risk profile point of view.”
At the same time, the customers themselves are changing.
“There has also been a deskilling within this marketplace. We are creating systems that allow tradesmen to install some of our products called Re-Newel cladding that transforms traditional turned newel into a clean and modern square newel,” Burbidge says.
But the biggest change Richard Burbidge has made recently has been an unprecedented overhaul of its IT systems.
“We ran an old legacy system from 1982, which made it difficult to interact with our customers,” Burbidge recalls.
That all changed on the 4th of December when Richard Burbidge went live with a brand-new IT system, Sage X3. Updating a business’s entire IT infrastructure by 40 years in less than two years is no small feat. Even choosing the new system was a challenge.
“In 2021 we did a beauty parade of suppliers and engaged an external party to help us choose which product was appropriate,” Burbidge recalls. “It was tabled to the board in early 2022. We started to look at the Sage 200 system, but with detailed scoping, we discovered that it was not an appropriate solution for the scale and complexity we needed. So, we moved to the Sage X3 system.”
The process took 12-18 months to implement, with support from Richard Burbidge’s partners, Datel.
“It involved an enormous amount of work from our internal team to scope out how our processes and systems work in conjunction with each other,” Burbidge says. “We had to ensure the system delivered the appropriate documentation and products to our customers, with room to enhance them in the future.”
Richard Burbidge’s customers range from multinationals to small one-off unit work, and its systems need to work as smoothly for both.
“The complexity associated with communicating with B&Q is very different from communicating with someone who writes their order on a handwritten note,” Burbidge points out. “We needed detailed scoping and touchpoints, and the transition was quite an onerous project.”
At the same time, Richard Burbidge had to bring its employees along on the journey, ensuring the system was adopted appropriately so that its benefits were maximised. When we speak with Burbidge, the process is still ongoing.
“We’re not there yet but the system works for us,” Burbidge says. “I feel that the project has been managed well internally and externally by our third-party partner. I see it as a successful implementation.”
The new system handles stock management, invoicing, customer and supplier accounts, and all business documentation. It is a holistic system that is bringing Richard Burbidge into the 21st century.
“We are now focused on delivering the benefits of this new IT system,” Burbidge says. “Looking at the longer term we want to consolidate our market position in the wood-based manufacturing sector in the UK. We will increase the number of products we push through our factory. We can also see significant opportunities for generating our own electricity as a cost-saving measure compared to other manufacturers.”
With its new IT system in place, Burbidge is preparing the business for its next phase, laying the foundations to grow the sale of branded products.
