Adam Swarbrick is one of the North-West’s most driven and ambitious entrepreneurs, having taken turned a humble family run business into a business group comprising six multi-million pound enterprises in just over five years.
He has continued to reinvest in the North-West, significantly contributing to the area’s status as the UK’s second biggest business region.
Adam, director of Designer Hot Tubs (designerhottubsdirect.co.uk), is a Horwich lad, having grown up in the area and attended St Joseph’s School.
Here he tells Advertiser readers his story...
What’s the story of The Contact Group and the way that the business has been built up over the past few years?
In 2008 I started a telecoms business with my brother in law, after I had worked in the telecoms industry for the previous six or seven years and I decided to go it alone. My brother-in-law John Lynch, his father owns a business called Contact Packaging PLC so we used their offices and we merged together to make Contact Telecoms and that became a very successful B2C and B2B company. We became one of our distributor’s main resellers in the country.
How did you ensure the business continued to grow?
After that in 2012 we bought out a company called Designer Radiators Direct - it was in financial difficulties and we’ve turned it around completely. The figures we are doing now are 700% more than when we bought it out. We built the business up and went from one member of staff to five, we bought a showroom on Buckshaw Village near Leyland, which is under construction and we’ve reinvested money to build the brand bigger and bigger.
You have also branched out into solar panelling and hot-tubs, what’s the story there?
Now we’ve also built up a solar panel business which will have turnover this year of nearly £4 million. We do installations all over the country, every day. We are one of the biggest independents in the country. It’s going strong and we are improving every month. We have also decided to go down the hot tub route as well and with that product we are aiming at customers who have a few quid in the high end of the market.
What relationship do your companies in each sector have with each other?
These are all individual businesses with different shareholders in each one but they are all linked together and I am the common denominator in each one. We do cross sell between the individual brands, for example selling hot tubs to our existing radiator client base and vice versa and the same with the solar side of things as well. It has been a massive upward trend in the last five years to get from where we’ve come from to where we are now really.
Are the businesses mainly ecommerce firms?
With Designer Radiators Direct, the whole of that business is online. It’s all online sales and I’d say with that business this year we’ll probably turn over £2.5-£3 million. Every enquiry we get for solar PV comes via the web and we’ve built a couple of decent sites where we get our leads. A lot of solar companies send a rep out to sell the product, but we sell all ours on the back of a brochure. We only use high street brands, like LG and Solar World, just products people have heard of, which helps.
What sets you apart from your competitors and what advice do you have for somebody going into business?
Always make sure that the products are good as you only want to go to the customer once and always make the price fair. We are selling a great product at a good price and that’s been our ethos from the start. We’ve looked at the market and the market share that we want, then we’ve always tried to sell the customer the best possible product they can afford in the price range. So on solar for example we charge £6000 for the installation, we use the best possible products and we still make a great margin. It’s all family run and we keep it very streamlined.