Watch: Insider interview with Josh Burbidge, managing director, Archwood
Archwood makes timber components for buildings at its factory in Chirk, near Wrexham. Its brands include Richard Burbidge, which supplies parts for staircases. Managing director Josh Burbidge talked to Douglas Friedli about how to succeed in a competitive market, reducing energy usage, creating a business culture for sustainability, and potential acquisitions. You can read a further interview with Josh Burbidge in the August/September 2024 edition of Wales Business Insider magazine.
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00:00So, I'm here in Chirk with Josh Burbage, who's Managing Director of Archwood Group.
00:16Josh, what does Archwood do?
00:20So, Archwood is a timber component manufacturer with three brands, Richard Burbage, Atkinson & Kirby and Masons Timber Products.
00:31We predominantly make timber products for the construction sector, selling into the DIY retail, trade merchant, flooring retail and staircase manufacturing sector.
00:47Manufacturing is a highly competitive activity to be involved in, there's a lot of costs, there's a lot of markets to think about.
00:59So, how do you make a success of it?
01:01So, manufacturing is a very, very competitive market and in the UK it's very challenging to be a manufacturer of volume product.
01:09The critical thing is to have significantly well-trained individuals in your factory to ensure that things move through your business in the most efficient manner.
01:23The machinery you invest in is of high quality and reduces the breakdown or downtime of any machines, so we invest in any of the best machines here.
01:36And we have a good team of people who ensure that from a business point of view, we understand where our costs are, we drive them out on a regular basis.
01:47We keep our people safe as well to ensure our health and safety standards are high and we control what we can control from a business perspective.
01:57So, we've worked very hard to reduce the energy consumption associated with any of the production processes that we do.
02:05One of our largest drivers of energy or energy consumption on the site is our extraction facility and we have worked on that very hard to reduce the amount of energy required to drive our overall extraction facility.
02:24And we've also invested significantly in our energy generation on site to ensure that we pay as minimal amount of money for the energy that we consume from a business perspective.
02:39And I understand you're moving in a more sustainable direction. So, first of all, what's your motivation for that?
02:47So, sustainability is one of the key five pillars of our business, so under responsibility.
02:54And from a business perspective, we've always pride ourselves on the fact that we're at the forefront of sustainability.
03:01And from our perspective, it makes commercial sense to go out there from a business point of view and reduce your costs of running your business.
03:13So, from a sustainable perspective, if you're reducing your impact on the environment, you are able to minimize the costs of running your overall organization.
03:24Also, it's a tool to sell your products over and above your competition.
03:30So, from a business point of view, we unashamedly use that as a badge from a business perspective to try and drive forward a differentiator between us and our competition.
03:44And also, we feel it's fundamentally the right thing to do from a business point of view to reduce our carbon emissions and make us the most sustainable manufacturer of timber components in the UK.
03:57And so, what are maybe two or three of the sustainability initiatives you've taken?
04:03So, initially, we set up the ESG group from a business point of view with 10 employees from different levels across the organization who came up with the ideas of how to improve our sustainable credentials from a business perspective.
04:22The largest one we've done on site to date is the investment of three quarters of a million pounds on the solar panel array on the roof, which has meant that we installed 2,600 solar panels to generate almost 40% of our total energy consumption.
04:40In addition to that, we have looked at our extraction facility, rerouted our extraction facility, reduced the number of fans required to drive our extraction, which has meant that our energy consumption has dropped dramatically and that has saved us quite a significant amount of money.
04:59And the third one that really has made a difference is also the move from diesel trucks to electric forklift trucks across the business, and that's really helped us from a business perspective reduce our total emissions.
05:17And that has totaled a 66% reduction in our total carbon emissions of scope one, scope two. From the first year we started measuring it to the second year we were doing it. And we did that in line with moving to a fully renewable source of energy from a business point of view as well.
05:42Hi, so what advice would you give to another business that's thinking about maybe going towards net zero but not really sure how to start?
05:49So we started the journey, as I say, about three years ago from a sustainability perspective. And one of the critical things is to get a team of people who are interested in this topic across different levels of the business interested in it and, you know, owning it from a business point of view.
06:09And that really helps embed in the culture changes that are required from a business process perspective. I would also say going out and getting a third party accreditation business. We use a company called Planet Mark, but there are others around that can help you on the journey for you to understand what your total carbon emissions are, because there is a certain amount of greenwashing that goes on within the marketplace.
06:38And I feel that actually using a third party audit business and spending a little bit of money with them to help you understand what your carbon emissions are is the right approach to take. Gives you credibility when you go out there and make a plan to try and reduce your emissions.
06:56How else might the business change over the next, say, five, 10 years?
07:01So as a business, we're setting out an ambitious growth plan over the next three to five years, which we're just in the process of drawing up with my relatively young executive team.
07:14We aim to reach net, sorry, we aim to halve our carbon emissions by 2030 and reach our net zero target by 2050 across the evaluated scopes.
07:30We also want to branch into new markets. So we have investment in new machinery. There's two bits of new machinery that we've invested in that help us deliver an improved product offering from ease of fit for our current range of products to reduce the fit time and technicality of fitting staircase and outdoor decking components.
07:56And also branching into new markets from our perspective into the furniture manufacturing market. And that's where we want to be from a business perspective and potentially the opportunity to grow into other markets through acquiring other brands, strong brands within our timber component manufacturing sector.
08:26Thank you.