Be Flexible.

Maurice Edward shares some history from the early years.

“Our history can actually be traced back 72 years. I had finished National Service and in 1949 joined my brother Arnold to restart a company called Edward Radio (when the war came along it was a young company and closed down). We invested £500 each. Arnold was responsible for implementation, I looked after customer service and sales.

Our suppliers included manufacturers like Bush, Pye, Baird, Lyons, and wholesalers like Morphy Richards. In those post-war years customers could not get enough of the product and our business grew. When the Coronation was celebrated in 1952 demand was so high we sold out!

Then we had another lucky break. One of our wholesale suppliers, Harrison Russell, were the sole distributer of Grundig Radio — then the first reel-to-reel tape recorder distributors. They showed me something called the Stenoret and said “what do you think of this?” Well what I thought was this could give us the whole dictating market. It made serious money. From the Stenoret we started getting interest in calculators and sold electro-mechanical calculators in the banking world.

At this point it was the mid fifties — we opened three further shops in Chiswick, Putney and Knightsbridge — and we never had a mortgage.

Next we bought Middlesex Electrical Wholesalers. Then Kerry’s of Perivale, Duran of Reading and Wireless Electronics who had several sites. All great businesses with strong management. We no longer needed any other wholesalers.

In 1959 we heard that Black Arrow (part of the Granada Plc
conglomerate) was looking for a buyer. This was to be our aha moment. We bought Black Arrow from Granada and it came with a building in Aintree. We moved the whole operation from the North West down South to Wembley. That expanded our asset finance and leasing business into something much much bigger.

In the 70’s we moved into furniture and expanding the office-fit out business through asset finance and leasing contracts. We became the English distributer of 3M Germany and MIM of Italy and bought a company called Associated Furniture Holdings which gave us a factory in Rotherham. We then became furniture manufacturers and could now provide a 360 service from finance to fit-out.

In the 1980’s we did the total fit-out of Hill Samuel then Merrill Lynch — Mercury Asset Management previously. These were significant deals then.

We were employing 500 plus and became a listed company. We bought a site in Hounslow which had two acres which gave us 50,000 feet of warehousing. Black Arrow had it’s new HQ.

It is very true that we had good luck in those early years which helped us achieve this growth. We also had some excellent advice. One of our mentors, John James, even gave us a winning stock tip. He said invest in GEC — it became Marconi!

We have had lots of fun and been privileged to work alongside terrific people.

The biggest lesson I have learned and would love to share is simply this:

Mentally transpose yourself with the customer. Ask yourself ‘what does the customer want.’