In the latest episode of the Evolve to Succeed podcast, Mark Northey—owner of Norco Composites—talks honestly about his experiences of taking over the family business at a young age, reveals his passion for people and reveals how he manages a staff of 180 in what is still essentially an entrepreneurial operation.
Here are a few highlights from the podcast:
Those first few months when you unexpectedly had to take over the family business, aged 21—how did you cope with that?
The biggest positive I would ever take from it is that I was incredibly lucky in that the sixteen or eighteen people that we had [working for us] supported [me taking over] a hundred percent. You can imagine in a manufacturing, blue-collar working environment it would have been like rats leaving a sinking ship, but it wasn’t that at all. And we’d just taken on a few new people as well and those few new people really did rise to the occasion to back me up, support me, and so we became very quickly a family and a support network for each other. They looked after me. They were all a lot older than me, but they were a great bunch of people and I still have two or three of them with me today, which is amazing.
I just put my head into the work and worked really hard. You think about how you’ve got sixteen, eighteen people that have got families, that have got mortgages, that are completely reliant on you. And I look now and I still feel that way today about Covid and the virus and redundancies and what’s going on in the world out there and it’s horrendous. And you have to think about the personal aspect of business as well as sometimes being a bit cutthroat too.
What gets you out of bed? What gives you the passion and drive to do what you do?
The people that I work with. I work with some very clever people; I work with people who understand elements of the business far better than I do, particularly from an engineering standpoint. My engineering knowledge and expertise is home-grown, there’s no qualification with it, it comes from experience and knowledge of past projects.
We have some exceptionally talented and qualified people, we’re working with some incredibly exciting businesses, doing some incredibly exciting things and it’s a little bit ‘boys for toys’ so it’s UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), submarines, communication devices, satellite dishes, radomes. Yeah, it’s boys and toys I guess! … I’ve always looked up to people, I’ve always found inspirational elements in people, characteristics, and talent in people and just people’s ability to be very specialist at certain things; I love that.
You’ve got 180 employees, multiple sides of the business in different locations but you’re still a very entrepreneurial business—how do you communicate, how do you keep that consistency within your team?
We have very regular, 8am Friday morning meetings where we pull all the department heads together from each area and element of the business and we just sit and we discuss. It’s very simple but we sit and discuss what each element of the business is doing; we have a sales and engineering conversation around that too, we have a quality [assessments], we have a transfer of knowledge and skills across all elements of the business.
We try and share the responsibilities, we try and share expertise within the business and I mean from shop floor [upwards]. It’s a little bit difficult but sometimes we’ll just transfer staff and teams across where we have to back-fill capacity, back-fill planning, et cetera, but really we just talk, we just all get together.