Company: Silver Spring
Job title: operations director
Sales: c.£40m
HQ location: Folkestone, Kent
Number of employees: circa 200


What's it like to work for your company? There is a real buzz working as part of a private equity turnaround business. This business has some serious heritage dating back to 1870. Our challenge is to provide rapid performance improvement and business growth while respecting the heritage and tradition of Silver Spring.

Why is it a good employer? It is a tough and demanding environment to work in but this brings many benefits. It provides opportunities for individuals and teams to become more involved in day-to-day improvements and to work more closely as part of a close-knit team. Staff can broaden their responsibilities, learn lots about their capabilities and enhance their skills.

Does the company offer any unusual benefits? We offer a company pension scheme, flexible working arrangements, attractive shift patterns, and all our employees have the option of private medical insurance.

How does the company differ from its rivals? We are developing a new business model combining brand growth and focused customer service, particularly in contract packing. We have a lot of flexibility in our operation but also have the benefit of significant scale, with a highly invested seven-line manufacturing operation. Finally, we have our own spring water source, which gives us a benefit and greater capacity than many of our competitors.

What's the training like? Traditionally, outside of the shop floor, there has been little management training and development offered. We are addressing this through our new HR team and will be looking to roll out company-wide training later on this year. We are also keen to sponsor our staff to develop their skills and abilities outside of work.

What's your proudest achievement of the past 12 months? The improvements we've made in raising standards in the factory. We've introduced a whole raft of changes to align our standards with the best in class. We've launched a wide ranging regime of internal auditing.

What is the most important HR issue? We've been through a lot of changes over the past 10 months since we changed ownership. We chose as a board of directors to walk away from around £10m of unprofitable business. This meant we had to streamline our business and go through a tough phase of redundancies. We are now moving forward and have recently recruited a very dynamic sales team.

Are you looking for any people right now? As an expanding business we are constantly on the lookout for talented individuals particularly people who have relevant industry experience, can work within a change management environment, and have specific skill sets relevant to a business such as ours including technical, engineering, logistics, and so on.

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