Scaling Brompton – How Brompton Bikes Went Big Without Losing Their Soul (Part 1)

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Scaling Brompton – Transforming Handcrafted Bike Production into a Lean Manufacturing Powerhouse
Recorded live at Bespoked 2025 – Europe’s biggest handmade bike show at Victoria Baths, Manchester

Join Nigel Saffrey, former Chief Operations Manager at Brompton, as he takes you behind the scenes of one of the UK’s most iconic cycling brands. In this fascinating two-part talk, Nigel shares how Brompton scaled its operations from a meticulous, handcrafted process into a modern lean manufacturing powerhouse—right in the heart of London.

In this first part of the talk, Nigel dives into the early challenges, key turning points, and strategic decisions that enabled Brompton to grow without sacrificing design integrity or product quality.

Whether you’re a bike enthusiast, engineer, or simply fascinated by how craftsmanship and efficiency can coexist, this session offers invaluable insights into the journey of scaling an artisanal product in a competitive global market.

👉 Watch Part 2 here:

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so what I learned working with Andrew is if you’re going to disagree with Andrew you better have all the facts lined up and you need to be putting a strong case so they got to 400 they’d made 400 of these then Andrew went back to the supplier of the Ford uh the forged um hinges who were French and said “I’d like to place an order for some more hinges.” And the French went “There are no hinges we didn’t make any money unless you want to buy order 10,000 we’re not even going to entertain the idea so we had three different handlebar types you had 11 colors of bike you could have a twocolor bike we had three different tire options we had a standard front wheel a hub dynamo um we had battery lights we had a super light front wheel we had three different saddles mug guards rack battery lights so it came to something with the luggage it was something like 1.3 million options because the idea was well you’ve got to do your 76 hours you’ll make it up some other time and the timekeeping was terrible so it just me I come to work every day I came to I didn’t really know who I couldn’t rely on who was going to come in and what we were going to get done on any particular day so I just sound like a grumpy kid and I’ve got issues this this this [Music] My name’s Nigel um I worked at Brmpton for 11 years from the beginning of 2006 to the end of 2016 um I came as uh lean manufacturing manager um when I ca when I started the company was 50 employees making 13,000 bikes uh by the time I finished it was 240 of us making 44,000 bikes i’m here today because one of our design engineers was trying to organize to bring some brazers here to braise at the show um when I was at Brmpton um we often tried it we could never make the health and safety work oh here he is hello Colin um and I was very I thought it was a great idea to come here and brace and the organizers said “Oh could you bring someone along and give a talk?” So Colin said to me “Oh Nigel will you give a talk?” And I’m like “Yeah sure i like bespoked.” Anyway there were no brazes was it the health and safety that killed it or budget it was the budget the budget okay it’s on hold for now right so this is why I’m here to talk about um scaling at Brmpton um you are my guinea pigs i’ve never done this before um I’ve written a talk i have 38 slides so now I’m anxious that it’s actually going to be too long but we’ll see how we go okay so if we can have the first slide um I didn’t want to assume that everybody knew what a Brmpton was so that’s basically what makes us different is uh the average folding bike will have a hinge for the handlebars one for the main frame what makes a Brmpton different is the back wheel tucks under so you end up with a very small compact uh package my history with the company starts in 2006 i thought for a bit of context we’d go back to the beginning how the company came into being this is Andrew Richie so Andrew is the inventor of the bike and the founder of the company uh Andrew went off and did an engineering degree in the late60s um when he graduated he had a couple of jobs uh one working for an IT company and another one for an engineering company where he got some hands-on experience machining and welding um but he got bored with those and actually decided that what he’d really like to do is work for himself so he actually started a little business um selling um household plants so he bought a secondhand van from uh the GO and every morning he’d go off to uh New Coven Garden uh buy some house plants load up the van and then he’d spend the rest of the day knocking on doors in Hammersmiths and Putney selling his house plants and doing a bit of landscape gardening this went on for four or five years um at the same time um when he wasn’t using the van he’d use a bicycle to get around town like many of us he’d get frustrated he’d go to the pub um and he’d forgotten his lock or he’d be worried that actually it wasn’t very secure and he’d be worried if the bike would still be there when he came out so he had this idea wouldn’t it be great if I could just collapse the bike and take it with me but he never did anything about it it was just this this idea ticking around in his head at the same time as this there was a guy actually making a folding bike guy called Harry Bickerton so this is a Bickton for anyone who’s not sure um Harry was based in Welling Garden City in Hertfordshire and he had a mate called Bill Ingham so Bill was going around trying to find investors to invest in the Bickon so they could get some better tooling uh develop the product a bit more and he was going around knocking on doors and he had a meeting with Andrew’s dad so Andrew’s dad worked in finance in the city of London so this is why uh Bill pitched up he did his pitch and at the end of it Andrew said um Andrew’s father said “Nice idea but I don’t think it’ll ever come to anything it’s not for me.” But my son is a very talented engineer and I think he’d be a really good employee for your company perhaps you’d like to meet my son see if you want to offer him a job so the story goes that Andrew’s dad summoned him sat him down gave him a good talking to told him I had had this very good education and he was wasting it you know and all the rest of it it was about time he pulled himself together so Andrew agreed to have a meeting meet with Billingham bill showed him the bike andrew took a look at it and thought “Well actually I could do a lot better than that.” And this is the thing with Andrew he’s very he’s a great thinker he’s very smart engineer and he likes things done his way so what I learned working with Andrew is if you’re going to disagree with Andrew you better have all the facts lined up and you need to be putting a strong case and usually the best I’d ever get out of Andrew was it has some merits i don’t remember ever Andrew ever saying to me “That’s great.” Or “That’s brilliant.” Or they’d always be he’d and he’d always ask “But what about this what about that i haven’t even thought about these things.” you get so enthusiastic about how you got this idea so having seen the the Bickton he thought right I can I can do better so he went out he bought some tubes and some uh brazing equipment and he made the first prototype in his bedroom of his flat so this is 1975 he made prototype number one and prototype number two and then he needed a bit of money to be able to get some more materials and some parts so he had a chat with his friends and together they they chipped in £1,000 to buy him some more materials and um in return he formed a company and gave them all some shares so the company was formed in 1976 so with this money he then went on and produced prototype number three which is this one um that resulted in a patent so the patent was granted in May 1977 and then we had prototype number four so the company still has prototypes two three and four which used to be on display until we got an archivist who came and archived everything we’ve done over 40 years and she said “These are far too valuable to have you all with your grubby fingers on and mcking around with them.” So they’ve all been locked up in a vault hopefully they’ll come back one day and we can stick them on the wall prototype number three and then four once he made his fourth prototype he was happy with his design and um he decided that he didn’t actually want to go into bicycle manufacturer he thought what he’d do is he’d approach a big bike company get them to license the design and then he and his fellow shareholders could sit back and the money would trickle in and he’d go off and find something else to do so the first company he approached was Rally who at the time were making a million bikes a year in Nottingham so he wrote to them he sent them some photos some drawings uh followed up with some phone calls had a meeting few weeks went well quite a few weeks went past and eventually he got the rejection letter which was nice idea but we don’t think it has any commercial value not for us he approached doors got the same answer he even went to um Black & Decka who had recently um launched the workmate a folding workbench and they were they the idea was that they were looking for more products and they said no as well so having been able to license find someone to license it he then followed the same route as Billingham and he was around knocking on the doors of banks trying to get investors and it all came to nothing so this went on for a couple of years but we think it’s good um went on for a couple of years um and he became quite obsessed by it and every time he met his friends or family all he’d be talking about was this folding bike so eventually his friends said to them “Andrew you’re driving us nuts how about we go out and we will pre-ell some bikes for you?” It’s like an early form of crowdfunding how many bikes do we need to sell and at what price for you to be able to get the materials and some machines and get going so Andrew said “Well if I could sell 30 bikes at £250 which is about £950 today that will give me £75,000 and I’ll probably be off and running i will make the bikes in 12 months and if the company ever makes a profit I will give the £250 back.” That was the deal so his friends went out and they actually sold 50 bikes so Andrew then went and borrowed some space from a friend’s engineering workshop in Hammersmith guy called Nick Rous Rousv um and it actually took him 20 months rather than 12 months because he’s such a stickler for detail and obviously he had he had his prototypes when he came to manufacture it wasn’t quite the same so anyway this is bike number oops wrong way that’s Andrew with the finished bikes and this is bike number 31 so this is one of those first 50 you can see it’s got quite a unsophisticated bend in the middle that was just bound to the the meth he had to him and the thing that took the most time was actually the the hinges here and here the hinge is actually got a cam in it so they’re all fabricated by hand so when the when the frame closes up and you push the lever over it’s on a cl a cam so it holds it really tight this is what took all the time and you’ll notice that the handlebars all also braced at the handlebar stem they came in one color red they all had a rack they went off so the 50 bikes went off they were well received and he was up and running so then he moved from Hammersmith uh to a workshop um Q Gardens just across the road from the botanical gardens took on his first um employee guy came called Patrick and they started producing um Mark1 Brmptons so they got to 400 they’d made 400 of these then Andrew went back to the supplier of the Ford uh the forged um hinges who were French and said “I’d like to place an order for some more hinges.” And the French went there are no hinges we didn’t make any money unless you want to buy order 10,000 we’re not even going to entertain the idea so he got stuck so the actual hinges look like this so this is bike number 85 so it’s a much simpler design but much like today so you’ve got the clamp on the end so he’d actually taken orders for more than 400 bikes so he actually spent six months machining hinges to finish all the orders off so this was 1982 he stopped building bikes and he just worked for the engineering company at Q Gardens instead um in the meantime one of his first customers was a guy called Julian Verica so Julian was an entrepreneur a businessman who’ started Name Audio high-end hi-fi company that was still in business today um one of Julian’s passions was sailing so at the weekend he and his girlfriend were getting his little sailboat sail up and down the English Channel across to France every time they got into a a port they’d unfold their Brmptons cycle into town have a meal buy some nice cheese and wine pedal back fold the bikes up get back in the boat so Julian uh we got to the end of 1985 julian was looking to buy some more bikes he managed to track Andrew down i said “Oh the bikes are great i’d like to buy a couple more for some friends.” And Andrew explained that there weren’t any bikes there wasn’t a company because he couldn’t get the hinges so Julian said “Well what do you need?” And Andrew said “Look if I’m going to do this I want to do it properly i’m going to it’s going to be £100,000 and with my friends and family and a grant from the GLC so the London Council I can get to about £60,000 i can’t get the other £40,000.” So apparently Julian said Julian said “Not a problem i’ll go and get uh an overdraft at the bank.” So Julian went off got an overdraft and became our first sales and marketing director so the idea then was that um we would subcontract the manufacturer of the frames to a company up in Walsaw the frames would then be painted before being shipped down to London where the bikes would be assembled by Andrew and his colleagues then at the last minute Andrew changed his mind because he was he wasn’t convinced that he would get the quality he wanted from the subcontractor and that the only way to get the quality was if he was to make the frames himself inhouse so instead of going into production in 1986 18 months went by whilst he designed built tested and remade all of the braise jigs needed to build a Brmpton which totals about we have 17 separate braise operations so it was finally the beginning of 1988 when the company started up and running and we’ve been in continuous production ever since so our first factory was a railway arch in Brenford this is uh Sunny brazing some frames inside the arch and this is Andrew assembling a bike so that was 1988 things went well in 1991 we took over the second railway arch 1993 we moved three miles to Chisik that’s the bike they were making that’s a Mark 2 Brmpton they moved to Chisik to Bolo Lane 17 employees um two of whom are still here mark and Ed still work for Brmpton so they both look a little older now like we all do but they’re still there then in 1998 they moved again they moved to Qbridge uh so that was a 22,000 square foot factory 28 people moved in making 6,000 bikes we’ll go with that yes 6,000 it was 3,600 here and then by 1998 it was 28 employees making 6,000 bikes so this is Qbridge and the factory is the Lshape with the white roof uh next to the elevated section of the M4 just by the uh Chisik flyover and in the corner is the new Brenford football stand so the photo was taken after we’d left we left in 2016 that’s why he’s got a bunch of cars outside and no bicycles and I see the garden’s gone and anyway so in 2002 a young engineer joined the company called Will Butler Adams so I mentioned Will’s name because Will has been the CEO for the last 16 and a bit years now so Will’s key to the story um and Will came along having come from IC ICI uh was used to a modern company with systems and procedures and everything being documented turned up at Brmpton and it was very very different the big issue they had was they just couldn’t make enough bikes so um they were making by the time I turned up in 2006 they were making 13,000 bikes but the lead time would be 11 weeks in the winter and went out to 16 weeks in the summer so if you placed an order for a bike in August you’d be lucky to get it in time for Christmas so they didn’t actually have a manufacturing manager production was managed by three different people so Will would look after the tooling and a bit of people greg used to order the paint and look after the building and Mike used to do the purchasing and then they had three supervisors but it was all a bit haphazard so they advertised for a manufacturing manager um I’ve always cycled but I’d never heard of Brmpton but um my background is I’d been working for 20 years at that point just over 20 years i’d work I’d had worked for four different companies the main one was Duta making pneumatic tools so I started there in 1985 1993 we got bought by Atlas Copco so Duta were 500 Atlas Copco with 25,000 they came in they changed everything they taught us modern manufacturing methods um what is known as lean manufacturing today back then was called just in time so this is where I learned all about lean manufacturing um I was responsible for some of the changes that we did thoroughly enjoyed it and then the company sponsored me to do my masters so I did my masters then I went to work for one of my old managers and we made another transformation at the next company changing from the old traditional ways of manufacturing to the new ways so this is why Will recruited me so I came along had a it was a six-hour interview with Will which is basically a chat it was just a chat then I had to go and have an interview with Andrew and Mike which was a bit different with Andrew saying “But why but why?” But and andrew asked me “What did I think?” And I’d had my I’d been let down by the previous company the interim one who said they wanted all this change and when I got there they wanted change but they didn’t want me to upset anybody so I thought well I’m not going to i got very frustrated so I thought well I’m not going through that again so when Andrew said you’ve been around the factory what do you think and I said it’s amazing i said it’s rammed to the rafters with work in progress with stock there’s stuff here that I’ve only seen in history books i just told him exactly what I felt he stopped the interview he they sent me out the room for 20 minutes and apparently Andrew said to Will “Oh he wasn’t sure that I would I would fit that I’d cause too much trouble.” So anyway it took six weeks for Will to persuade Andrew to give me a start so this is what the factory looked like when I turned up this is the stores on the left um the stores was absolutely rammed and the the philosophy at the time was well if we buy in bulk we’ll get a cheap unit price so that’s why they were buying in bulk um but they didn’t take into account the cost of holding it stock taking it uh obsolescence anything like that and there was so much of it we always struggled to find what we were looking for at the same time the slide on the earth that’s actually the assembly area but it’s the same it’s full of wheels it’s full of omni trolley which I’ll come to in a minute inspection trolley the only place that we built any bikes was along the back wall we had six bite building base the rest of it was just storage and the same here um so I started the beginning of 2006 spent the first few months learning the ropes meeting everybody found it a really nice place to work everyone was very friendly very passionate um but they were just stuck in their ways so I would say to someone “Oh this is interesting why’d you do it like that?” And nine times out of 10 the answer was “Well we’ve always done it that way.” And it seemed to me that they were doing it the same way as they’d done it since 1988 nothing had really changed it was just on a bigger scale so there were a few things that I had a problem with i had a problem with the the whole faces of the factory was just full of stock or work in progress um peacework was my biggest issue so peace work is where there’s a rate for the job an hourly rate and the more you do the more you get paid so if you go faster you earn more money but the Brmpton is a premium product our customers are paying a premium price for it and the most important thing that’s drummed into you from day one from Andrew is quality quality quality and I couldn’t square quality comes first but we’re paying people so the faster they work the more they get paid and we’d had peace work at Dutus when I first started in the 80s and Atlas Cropco got rid of it and they just and the other it became a multi-skilled workforce instead so this was my first issue was with the peace work um it also meant that with the peace work people had their favorite jobs and other jobs they didn’t like doing so they would try and pick and choose which jobs they did so in brazing in engineering where we were making the frames they’d be arguing to try and get the best jobs and then having started and got running they didn’t want to make any they just wanted to carry on so we had piles and piles of of one part and nothing of the other so here we’ve got batches and batches of forks in the stores but then what we found was that when we came to build bikes we’d have masses of one part and very little of something else so I remember one day I had hundreds of front main frames and I couldn’t find any front frames because they thought someone thought they were making more money by making main frames it was this sort of thing in brazing you’ve got the 17 different jobs that go up to make a Bronson frame and the supervisor was AB was called Abdul abdul was great abdul would issue a job and he’d say to Liam “Right I want you to make me 500 rear frames.” So that’s that rear triangle so you’ve got a chain stay and a seat stay just like a regular bike and then you have what we call tension stays to make the triangle so that you can fold Whoops you can fold the bike under so and then you’ve got rear frame final so there are four jobs to make a rear frame so Liam would go off to the stores route around try and find a tension tube jig take it back to his bay so his bay belonged to him so there’d be a big steel bench and there’d be all sorts of clutter and rubbish in it like this you can see here the tiny little space this guy Martin’s got to braze in you here was by the door with the cardboard up because the other side of the door is where we used to keep the setting in oxygen cylinders and every time you open the door the breeze came in so let’s say Liam goes off he finds the tension tube assembly jig brings it back to his bay then he’s got to go and find his own raw materials and each job they stamp we stamp the brazers’s initials so we’ve got traceability we know who who brazed each joint it means that the brazers don’t take any shortcuts because at any point we can pick a piece up and we know who made it if we’re not happy with it but the primary reason we did it was the bike goes out it’s sold let’s say five years later there was an issue and the bike came back we can see who braced the particular part so there was an issue there was a cross tube on the rear frame and um it sat up against both the chain stays so when you braze it it gets very hot and the air tries to expand so someone had the bright idea of drilling a hole in it tax as an exhaust which was fine until we sell it started selling lots of bikes in Poland and then through the long wind winter with them putting salt on the road salt used to get inside the cross tube and rot it from the inside out so in my time this is probably from 2006 to 10 I probably saw about 220 rear frames came back these were rear frames that were made in the ‘9s and someone had seen the problem and changed it so we just used to give everybody if someone had a corroded cross tube we’d just give them a new frame and we get we’d get the goodwill that way so um he’d stamp his own parts then he’d have to find the wooden boxes that he was going to put the rear frames in then he’d check his oxygen in his acetylene cylinders and if they were running low he’d have to stop someone else working they’d go and get the trolley chain up the cylinder take it outside swap it over then he’d do some brazing because we didn’t know how long the jig had been in the stores for we didn’t know if it was worn if it was damaged so then he’d have to take some samples and go off to inspection and get them checked so it’s just really really inefficient so I had a problem with that then on the assembly side assembly was split into preassembly final assembly and inspection so this is called an omni trolley so the sales would release the shop the orders down to the shop floor every bike is made to order they’d be batched up into 11s then preassembly would preassemble the rear frame the main frame so they’re joining the main frame to the front frame with the pin putting the cups in putting in the bottom bracket they’re putting the handlebars so you’ve got all the different gearing options and um the tires so at the time you could order any bike you wanted so we had three different handlebar types you had 11 colors of bike you could have a twocolor bike we had three different tire options we had a standard front wheel a hub dynamo um we had battery lights we had a super light front wheel we had three different saddles mug guards rack battery lights so it came to something with the luggage it was something like 1.3 million options okay and we took great pride in being able to buy any bike and then we’d go to a bike show and none of our customers knew because if they went into a bike shop they’d see a blue Brmpton with three gears or a red one with six gears very few people actually knew that you could have all these choices but it meant that every bike was built to order and because the Omni trolley held 11 bikes we put 11 uh preassembled kits on it and then you can see all these trolley are stacked up waiting for the bike builders to come along and take them now because it was peace work the preassembly guys have picked which which omni trolleys they want to load so they can earn the most money then the bike builders would come along and try and pick the omni trolley they thought had the easiest bikes to build so they could earn more money they would take that trolley back to their bay so the bay is on the right this is tot um crammed in putting the tires on the wheels you can just see how crammed it all was then in the bike bay you’d have the omni trolley on one side and then the trolley on behind Richard on the right that’s the inspection trolley so you’d go to your bay we had to put all the parts we needed for build any bikes in the in the bay so filling the bay up um we’d often have a stockout so we’d be spending time going from bay to bay trying to re redistribute the parts so everybody could be keep building and then as the bikes were built they’d go on an inspection trolley the inspectors would then come along go to their favorite bike builders where they knew the bikes had been built well built take their the trolley back to their bay and inspect the bikes there was an issue the bike went back to the bike builder to be fixed in their own time and then we’d often have arguments because they’d be arguing about whether the gears were set properly or whether the the brakes were correctly aligned this sort of thing so if it didn’t get resolved it just meant the bike used would sit there because the bike builder wouldn’t accept it was wrong and the inspector wasn’t going to do it so often the inspectors would have a full set of tools and they to avoid any aggro they would actually be correcting and fixing the bikes so we didn’t we didn’t build the quality in we inspected the quality in and these trolleys took up all this space it also meant that we started with six boat bike building bays we got to 10 before we changed and it meant that we couldn’t afford to go out and buy some fancy electronic tooling which we now have that that records the torque on every um critical fastener cuz these tools are 1012,000 a time we’re not going to buy 10 of those plus a spare one for a tool that’s probably used cumulatively for 20 minutes a day so we had basic torque wrenches and the running joke always used to be that if you were a bike you knew who the bike builders were because one shoulder muscle would be you know one their neck was like that on one side and this where they’re talking all day long there were a number of areas I thought were right for improvement we also had flexi time so that meant that the you had to work 76 hours in any two week period and the factory was open from 6:00 in the morning till 6:00 at night and 6 till 1 on a Saturday so it was open for 67 hours a week so you had plenty of opportunity to pick and choose when you worked plus there weren’t many holidays and I couldn’t find a sick pay system people got paid sick pay but on an individual basis you know like down to circumstances so what they were encouraged to do was if they wanted a day off they just didn’t come to work because the idea was well you’ve got to do your 76 hours you’ll make it up some other time and the timekeeping was terrible so it just me I come to work every day I came to work I didn’t really know who I couldn’t rely on who was going to come in and what we were going to get done on any particular day so I just sound like a grumpy gig don’t I this this this saw them as opportunities so this is the the cluttered bike bay with the um inspection trolley these are my three supervisors so this is Abdul who looked after brazing Torson who looked after engineering and Tota who looked after assembly okay all of them really tech technically brilliant okay really good at what they did every time you had a question about how fix how to build a bike you went and saw one of these three but the issue was they’d been promoted for their technical abilities no one seemed to have taken into account their man management skills okay so Abdul was pretty good the other two weren’t really especially Torston you you you’d say anything to Torson he just sort of grunt at you so I was thinking right I I need to to put these people in their best find the best role for them so over at the end of the first year I wrote everything up for well and I said these are the issues as I see them this is I think is the way forward and will bought into it so what I wanted to do was I was going to get rid of flexi time and I wanted a 4-day week so I’d introduced a 4-day week at two previous companies so I’m a really a strong advocate for a 4 day week so it’s the same number of hours but in condensed into four days rather than five i’d found that productivity goes up by 10% because people are better rested and relaxed they’ve had three days off at the weekend absenteeism falls to a third because you don’t get people phoning in with a upset stomach or a headache because they need to go to the bank or they want to go and see a new flat or back in the day it used to be all the young guys were going off to get a new phone contract and couldn’t wait um because they do that on the fifth day they do that on the Friday or whatever and then no one ever leaves because every weekend’s a bank holiday so this coming week next weekend it’ll be a four day is a 4-day weekend so I was a strong believer in the 4-day week i wanted that i was wanted to get rid of peacework and replace it with a multi-skilled pay system so the more skills you had the more money you’d earn um so because I wanted a flexible staff I wanted to cover for holidays and sickness and I wanted people taking an interest in everything we did and growing their skills because they’re just better employees what else did I want oh I wanted to get rid of um these brazers having their individual base i thought it made a lot more sense to have a base set for a particular job with the jig permanently in it so with our jigs that say it’s rear frame final we know that we can make probably 5,000 rear frame finals before the jig starts to wear because you’re clamping metal on metal so we have a preventative maintenance system now when we get to 4 and a half thousand cycles that jig comes out goes into the tool room gets refurbished then you do the checks adjust it if it’s necessary and then it’s sitting on the side ready to go back in the bay and it’s good to go also I wanted to get the cylinders out of the base i thought this is nuts this is a health and safety issue this we should be piping the gas in also I wanted to combine engineering and brazing because we had these large batches it made much more sense for me to have manufacturing cells so I wanted a a frame cell with main frame and front frame i had a rear frame cell had a handlebar cell because we have a pin and a support and we’d make these things as pairs because we consume as a pair so with the auto brace we braze the hinges which is slightly different we change the tooling so every every time you you’d braced anything you would braise a main frame and a front frame as a pair because we consumed them as a pair in assembly I wanted to get rid of this idea of omni trolley inspection trolley three separate departments wanted to put a line in so the issue with the the Omni trolley and people picking and choosing which bikes they built let’s say I had an order for Benelux 180 bikes 18 pallets uh 10 pallets of 18 bikes and Simon would want particular bikes on particular pallets because they’d go into a warehouse and he needed to know what was on each pallet so we’d issue the order on a Monday morning the bikes would go out people would pick and choose which ones they wanted to build or some would go back thursday lunchtime I’d probably have 160 bikes finished i’d be missing 20 bikes i’d have 10 part finished pallets filling up the space and then I’d have to go and find the bikes and either the omni trolley had been pushed to one side typically if it was a ptype with a hub dynamo or you had bikes sitting on a rack that the inspector said was wrong and the bike builder said and then I’d be spending Thursday afternoon cajoling people to get these bikes finished whilst you’ve got all this space taken up with part finished orders and it wasn’t just Benelux it would be Japan it would be Germany it would be South Korea here it was it was it was nuts so I wanted a line where we would issue the bikes in the order that we wanted made they’d come off the line you’d fill up a pallet of 18 and it would go and then the next and go it was all about creating more production space getting rid of all this stock getting rid of all this work in progress getting rid of the trolley freeing up space cuz the only way we were going to grow to 50,000 which is the target that will given me with a 2 to 3 week lead time not this 11 to 16 weeks I could see it was when we needed a bit of order and we needed space for production so I wrote this plan all up handed it in to Will went exactly what we want that’s great then we had to go and see Andrew because Andrew controlled everything it was his business he still owned 50% of the shares at the time he’d been doing this for 30 years you know since 1975 so at that point he’d been doing it for 30 years i had 20 years experience and Will had 10 years experience so Andrew had as much experience building the bike as the total of will and mine work experience so Andrew is like this is a bit drastic i really don’t think this is necessary is it and what about this and what about that and what about this and we’re like so we sort of started but um quietly and not trying to make cause too much of a ruckus and we sort of got stuck we knew what we wanted to do but we couldn’t do it without Andrew’s blessing because these were such fundamental changes and then we got lucky so the first thing that happened was there was a guy called um um John Put so John had worked for McKenzie the management consultant and he’d been the chief operating officer for Jordan Formula 1 cars for three years so he had quite a good business background he and his wife went to buy a couple of Brmptons and he was horrified at the 16week lead time so anyway eventually the bikes turned up and he was he was they’re chuffed with them but he wrote a letter into Will saying “You make a wonderful product we’re very happy with the bikes but oh my goodness this lead time you must be losing so many orders i think I can help you with that.” So Will brought the letter with me to me and said “Well what are we going to do?” And I said “Well he’s only telling us what you and I know but John is 10 years older than me and Andrew is 16 years older than me.” So the advantage with John was John was much closer in age to Andrew and Andrew’s friends who were non-execs on the board so Will offered John a place as a non-exec so he would be in the boardroom fighting our case along with Will so John started stayed 15 years and backed us to the hill every single time i mean he was good he would always challenge us and but we were all singing from the same page