Multi activity healthcare group

The group is £9m t/o, and specialises in providing healthcare and safety products, and also healthcare and safety placements to industrial users and commercial organisations. The business splits roughly 50/50 between products and placement (mainly temporary but also some permanent placements) elements of the business. There is also a very small safety/healthcare training business.

After years of steady growth within its niche market, the company attempted an acquisition that failed. The acquisition and assimilation processes were such that the group changed during the process, and entered a period of losses, culminating in a period from December 2005 to April 2006 when the company lost £495k.

I joined the group on 30th March 2006 as interim FD but with a mandate to return the firm to profit. During May the group made £9k profit, and during June £20k profit. The business is non-seasonal, and we expect to make steady and accelerating profits over the next six months, at which point the group will have a striking rate of £400k profit per year.

Healthcare Group

The above table shows that while turnover stayed more or less the same, the major improvement came from increasing margin. This happened across all activities within the group, but principally within products activity.

My role was:

  1. To alert management to their seriously eroding profitability.
  2. To highlight the causes of the losses, namely the non-performance of products division and in particular the margin they were making
  3. To specify appropriate operating ratios, mainly for products division
  4. To provide detailed employee cost information and to use that to re-specify and reduce the groups overhead costs.