by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

Brian Stannah chuckles as he remembers the first time he met the Queen. “It was in the mid-eighties, when we won the Queen’s Award for Export. I said: ‘If your mother ever needs a stairlift, give me a call.’ A few years later, we fitted one in Balmoral.”

Turning over £137m and employing more than 1,600 people, Stannah is the world’s largest maker of stairlifts – a godsend for the elderly – and a stunning example of a family business. It is owned and run by the fourth generation of Stannahs, brothers Brian (71) and Alan (67). Four of their sons – Jon, Patrick, Alastair and Nick – are with the firm, and there are ten sixthgeneration Stannahs waiting in the wings. “My 14-year-old grandson is doing work experience here next summer,” says Brian. “So it looks as if the family business will continue for a good few years yet.”

He admits that the company’s heritage is blurred. “We know that Stannah was established in the 1860s by my great grandfather, Joseph, who manufactured handoperated lifts, or ‘moving rooms’ as they were then quaintly termed.

But up until my father took over the business in the mid-1900s, the details are very patchy.” Brian recalls watching his father, whom he affectionately refers to as “Pop”, rebuild the family firm after World War II. “Pop was a Lieutenant Commander with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. When he returned to England in 1945, at the end of the war, the family factory had been hit by a German bomb.

Essentially, he inherited a pile of rubble. He used the small amount of money he was given from the government’s War Damage Commission and rebuilt a simple two-story factory. I remember laying some of the bricks myself.”

Brian joined the business in 1958, when he was 22, having been to college for a year: “I was a terrible student, the only thing I learned was how to play bridge.” He’d also just completed a four-year apprenticeship with Dartfordbased lift company J&E Hall, where he did everything from working in the drawing offices to carrying out surveys for installations.

Catastrophe averted

When Brian moved to Stannah, there were just 24 employees, and the company was about to hit a financial crisis. “We had a salesman who was under-pricing jobs to pull in the orders and build up his commission,” he says. “He sold a contract to install lifts in blocks of flats in Birmingham. At that time, the motor industry was burgeoning so it was virtually impossible – and expensive – to find good workers.

We over-borrowed from the bank and it brought us to our knees.” Brian had the sense to transfer the service side into a sister company.

“When the inevitable happened to Pop’s side of the business, we had a parallel firm up and running. Maintenance contracts were paid in advance every three months, so we used that up-front cash as seed capital to fund the business.”

Brian’s brother, Alan, joined the firm shortly afterwards. Oddly enough, there has never been any sibling rivalry. The pair developed side by side, with Alan taking on a technical role and Brian taking responsibility for commercial and financial matters. The brothers even share an office, and have done for more than 40 years: “The beauty of sharing an office is that you’ve always got half an ear on what the other person is doing. It means we both know what’s happening in the other half of the business.”

Eureka moment

Stannah continued building and servicing custom-made lifts until 1968, when Alan received a call from an Italian company, which was looking for a British distributor for its “Microlifts” – goods lifts that can be installed by one man in one day.

“We were amazed. Our goods lifts took two men two weeks to install. “That taught us the beauty of a standardised product. Instead of waiting for orders to come in and building products to spec, we could go out and sell direct. That prompted us to standardise our own range of passenger lifts, called ‘Maxilifts’, and start advertising in construction magazines such as The Architect and The Architects’ Journal. We were no longer continually trying to reinvent the wheel.”

But, in another brutal blow, that business was virtually wiped out by the miners’ strike in the early 1970s.

Orders for passenger lifts fell from 3,600 units a year to 1,250. The company had to diversify.

The brothers had noticed that, each week, someone would phone up and ask if the company sold home lifts. “We would always say ‘no’. But we were desperate for work so we started to say ‘yes’.” Alan and his team designed them; Brian went out and started selling them.

The “eureka moment” for the stairlifts came shortly afterwards, in 1974. The demand for home lifts was huge, but Brian was having to turn a lot of customers down.

Architecturally, the lifts just wouldn’t fit in their homes.

“Suddenly, the penny dropped. I realised that a stairlift would fill this huge gap in the market.”

Brian did some research and stumbled across a Dutch stairlift company called Jan Hamer. “I flew to Holland and proposed a licence agreement. I went there with a cheque for £5,000 and came back with a roll of drawings. I’d opened Pandora’s box. Each year for the next five years, sales doubled.”

By the late seventies, Stannah had outgrown its offices in Elephant and Castle in London, and moved to Andover in Hampshire. “We built our first office here in 1976. I specifically asked for one, main entrance. I didn’t want one door for the blue-collar workers and one door for the white-collar workers.”

The company started to spread its wings, picking up ailing companies across the country and launching its export business. “I asked Microlift for a list of its worldwide distributors and then approached them, one by one,” says Brian. “We now have distributors in nearly 50 countries and more than half of our stairlift sales come from overseas.”

The products come in an astonishing variety of shapes and designs, at an average cost of £2,500 each. There are stairlifts for curved stairs or outdoor steps, with swivel seats or adjustable arms, in woven fabric or full-grain leather. The majority are made in Andover – but not for long. Stannah is building a factory in the Czech Republic.

“We did look at China, but the bulk of our products are sold in Europe so it made sense to do it closer to home,” explains Brian.

Will this mean redundancies? “Unfortunately, yes,” says Brian. “We’ll lose about 80 shop-floor workers.” He pauses and looks at his hands. “It doesn’t come easily to us – it’s not what we’re about. But it’s a case of survival of the fittest. If we don’t outsource manufacturing, we’d be uncompetitive and lose even more jobs.”

Recruitment and nepotism

The sting of redundancy will be all the more painful at Stannah given the sheer level of staff loyalty. Of Stannah’s 1,617 employees, 53 have been with the firm for more than 25 years and 13 for more than 40 years.

Employees are encouraged with a performance plan, through which they share 20 per cent of the company’s earnings each year. “It’s not pro rata to salary,” says Brian. “If a senior manager receives an extra £300, so will the tea boy.”

He admits that finding bright, talented staff can be tough. “Three of our top directors are reaching retirement and I’ve been wondering how to replace them – whether we should recruit from inside the business or bring in an outsider. My view is that the devil you know is a darn sight better than the devil you don’t. You could go out into the marketplace and find somebody who, on paper, looks terrific and talks his way into the job, but then makes a mess of things.”

His policy has always been to have a mix of family and non-family members on the Stannah board – typically as a 50/50 split. “It’s important for outsiders to provoke debate. It stops you becoming complacent or blinkered.

“However, I do believe that the raison d’être of a family business is, quite simply, to provide for the family – and I would have to confess to a degree of nepotism,” says Brian. “I used to think it was a bad thing but now I realise that it’s a characteristic of any family firm.”

Even at the ripe old age of 72, Brian refuses to plan his succession. “What did my father do about succession? Absolutely nothing. I don’t think it was ever discussed; it was just a slow, seamless process. What do I plan to do about succession? Absolutely nothing.”

Tags: cash-flow, family business, business banking, growing a business, success stories, stannah, stannah stairlifts, exporting, brian stannah, doing business overseas, staff redundancy, succession, growing by acquisition, motivating staff, leadership, great entrepreneurs,