Business profile: Stephen Bagnall of Alfred Bagnall's & Sons

“The recession was nasty, far longer and deeper than anyone could have foreseen at the time.”

Faced with economic restraint Mr Bagnall and his team decided to avoid as much as possible the “textbook thing to do” and make large-scale cuts.

“People were not spending money,” he said.

“We sweated it out in the belief that we would need a certain number of people to service the market in the future. This paid off massively and in 2015 we had the most successful year in our history.”