Taking on your competitors and winning needs more than just energy and commitment. Clever thinking, creative ideas and the time to think strategies through with clarity are all on the menu too. Growth Business talks to five success stories.

Strategy building

When you employ 150 people, but only have three months of work, life can be sticky. Like most managers, Janet Lord spent her time worrying where the next job was coming from.

She is the granddaughter of Wilfred Lord who set up a building business in Rochdale, specialising in decorating and refurbishments. ‘We’d been going donkey’s years,’ says Lord, 38, who runs the business with her brother Andrew. ‘Profitability was good, but we had little innovation or change. In a small family business, you never have time to plan and think strategically. There is too much happening day to day. It is a constant battle to win more work and keep everyone busy.’

Five years ago, she took a step back for the first time and started to assess the company’s strategy. ‘We had a steady turnover of clients, but we were not winning many extra ones and the construction business was moving towards partnering. Our jobs of £250,000 to £500,000 were being packaged into massive contracts. With a turnover of £7.5 million, we were not really large enough to tender for this kind of work.’

So she and Andrew set themselves some targets. They wanted to push turnover up to £18 million in five years, of which 60 per cent was to be on a partnership basis. They then reviewed their 120 clients and ditched 50 of them, because they were only producing small, one-off jobs that were more trouble than they were worth.

Instead they began to concentrate on winning more business from people with whom they already had good relationships. They stopped putting in dozens of competitive tenders, which were won or lost on price, and started to put themselves forward for larger, more collaborative contracts that were mainly awarded on the basis of quality. ‘It is a new game for us,’ says Lord. ‘It is more complex, but you are looking at a partnership for five or ten years.’

It took 18 months before First Choice Homes in Oldham picked out Wilfred Lord as a small company with potential and awarded it a refurbishment contract of £30 million over five years. A second ten-year deal followed from Accent, a housing association, to look after external repairs for its 16,000 properties.

By 2004, Wilfred Lord’s turnover had almost doubled to £14 million and this year Janet Lord already has £10 million in the bag. ‘It is a huge improvement for us. Now we can look ahead to the next ten years. And our margins have improved. The industry usually operates on two or three per cent. We are up to eight per cent.’

On the back of these improvements, Wilfred Lord was last year judged to be the SME Contractor of the Year by The Contract Journal. ‘We might have been middle of the pack five years ago,’ says Lord, ‘but we have hit the front now.’

Beyond the menu

Atul Dawda started with an empty shell in the suburbs of Leicester at the age of 23. He now runs two of the city’s top restaurants and is looking to take his eclectic style of Indian cooking to the rest of the UK.

He arrived in Leicester from Uganda at the age of six in 1972. By his early 20s he was running his own chain of video and gaming shops. He franchised them and bought a failed 60-seater restaurant in Syston, a suburb of Leicester, which he re-opened as The Spice of India. Without any experience in food and in an out-of-town location, no one gave him much of a chance.

From the start, he set out to create exciting menus. Working with Indian chefs, he insisted on using quality foods and gave people the chance to order as they liked. ‘You don’t have to have what is on the menu. If you want more chilli or less garlic, we will do it for you. We don’t prep everything in big pots. It is a pain logistically, because you have to have more chefs, but it works really well. People always keep coming back.’

Designed as an eccentric gentleman’s lounge in raspberry and turquoise, the restaurant has now extended next door and can seat 135 people with room for 50 more in a function room. Sales are running at £500,000 a year, making it one of the four busiest restaurants in Leicester.

Swatlands, Dawda’s second restaurant, which he runs under licence from Everards, is just as lively, with takings of £8,000-£10,000 a week. Compared to The Spice of India, which is a volume business, Swatlands charges a premium and has a more contemporary format with wooden floors and chrome cabling.

Unlike his competitors, Dawda spends heavily on marketing, sponsoring local clubs, networks and charities. ‘People come to the restaurant, have a really good time and word of mouth spreads quickly.’

His next ambition is take his distinctive fusion of Asian and English culinary styles to a much larger audience and he is negotiating for licences elsewhere in the country with pub chains, such as Punch. ‘We have the right ingredients and the know-how to make it work,’ he says.