Profile: Jon Ellis

Jon Ellis, MD of manufacturer Ferno (UK), knew he wanted the top job from an early age. He told Suzan Uzel how sheer ambition and hard work helped him to achieve his goal.

JON Ellis had ambitions to become managing director even as a teenager working on the shop floor.

It was 1984 when Ellis joined patient-handling equipment maker FW Equipment, which later became Ferno (UK), and his task then was to help make mattresses for trolleys or covers for the old pole stretchers of the time.

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Several years on and the family-run firm would be bought by American business Ferno Washington, which already had a stake in the company but acquired the remaining shareholding.

“I set my sights on being a managing director quite early on,” recalled Ellis.

In fact, his goal was to secure the position by the age of 45 – he was just over 40 when he achieved that target.

Today, Cleckheaton-based Ferno (UK), a subsidiary of Ferno Washington, has a turnover of around £10m, of which £1m is exports derived from sales to about 35 different countries.

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It is a designer, manufacturer and supplier of medical equipment to emergency medical services, fire and rescue services, hospitals and other industries, and also has a range of products and services for the military, funeral and mortuary sectors.

When asked about the firm’s typical customers, Ellis struggles to come up with a comprehensive list, saying: “It’s a difficult question. Who can’t we sell to? We’ve always got a product for some form of facility.

“So if it’s a sports arena, when you look at a football club and there’s an accident on the pitch, a player gets injured, they’ll probably bring our product out to put him on to a stretcher, which is probably ours, then he goes to hospital.”

And the business is continually diversifying. It is expecting growth in the military sector thanks to product innovation, and the same goes for the emergency vehicles sector.

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“We can track when the blue lights are on, when they’re speeding. We can track the CO2 emissions and reduce their fuel costs. We can track where the vehicle is at any one time. It’s a complete new solution to the emergency medical services,” explained Ellis.

“It’s a fascinating industry, saving lives for patients and also coming out with new products. Product innovation is the lifeblood of our business.”

Indeed innovation is an integral part of his strategy as MD, but Ellis is also keen to get across another aspect of his philosophy on achieving success in business. He is part-way through Sir Richard Branson’s book Business Stripped Bare and explains: “The main focus of that book is ‘how do you do business?’

“The way that you do business is by ‘doing business’.

“Sometimes in business you’ll go into something for the first time ever. But it’s the experience you get from doing that business, learning from it, whether it’s a positive or a negative, and then expanding that experience.

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“You might not always make the right decision. But you learn from any decision.”

And Ellis has certainly lived by his words while working his way up through the ranks over the last three decades taking on a variety of roles. “From a sales order being received right through to invoicing to the customer, I know the complete process because I’ve lived and breathed that for 28 years in December,” he said.

After joining the soft goods manufacturing department as a 16-year-old, Ellis quickly realised he wanted to pursue a role in the engineering department. It was when he secured an internal transfer to a mechanical engineering position that he began studies at Bradford College to take the relevant exams.

When the company changed its name to Ferno (UK) in 1992, Ellis was promoted to production manager for both metal and soft goods, ahead of a sideways move to technical support manager. The business moved to its current premises in Cleckheaton in 1997 and Ellis became operations manager, later being promoted to operations director, and then managing director in 2008.

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“When people say ‘well, how did you do it?’ I’d put it down to ambition, desire and a lot of hard work.

“Doing my MBA I remember to this day, I was in the US on a conference. I had I think it was four to six thick MBA books I had to do a dissertation on. I was then travelling back to the UK market, and I had to go out to Slovakia. Trying to balance all that with family life as well, it’s not easy,” Ellis said. Self-motivation is key, he added.

Looking ahead, Ellis said he is “extremely confident” about Ferno’s future. “Turnover has increased from about £9m four years ago to about £10m now. We had a peak year in our fiscal 2011. It was just over £11m because of two or three big contracts we won that year so it was kind of a spike year.

“The new products coming out now and the new divisions we’re operating in, we’re looking for growth over the next two or three years.”

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Though Ellis won’t reveal profit figures, he says profitability is increasing year on year. And he says the business has become more efficient with the introduction of “lean manufacturing principles” three years ago. A reduction in staff numbers was a knock-on impact of this, he said.

Meanwhile, the business is having to constantly adapt to the changing face of the markets in which it operates. The public sector in particular has thrown up a number of challenges due to spending cuts.

“They are always looking for something cheaper I would say to reduce the cost,” added Ellis, who reports positive feedback on one of Ferno’s latest innovations to meet this demand, its Compact 2 Track chair, which went on to the market in September.

“This has a detachable track so if you go to a house and there’s a patient critically ill upstairs and the paramedics go in they can attach the track to the back of the chair, put the patient on the chair and descend down the stairs. It reduces the risk of manual handling injuries.” Aimed at NHS ambulance trusts and private providers, the device combines two products in one, he said.

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And the public sector has also changed the way it does business, says Ellis. “The public sector doesn’t purchase today like it did three years ago. The new government has put restrictions in on expenditure, that’s one thing, but the way they go about business, they have three or four different tiers to sign off a purchase order for instance.

“You have to target different people in those public sector organisations so we have to take a different approach.”

He cited this example: “We won an order recently for a specialist stretcher to be used within a hospital, a hospital transfer to another hospital, plus a product for moving neo-natals about. We started that job one year ago and we got the order last week. It took a year to get that order and it’s a value of £15,000.

“It’s all the different internal battles that they have to go through to raise the order. We’ve been told all the way through the process ‘you’ve got the order, the order is yours’, but it just took a year. Now how can you plan for that? You can’t plan for it, can you?”

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Aside from the challenges of public sector procurement, there are the obvious economic hurdles. “You have to fight for every order,” says Ellis, although he is confident his ethos, of adapting and innovating, is the answer.

Having clocked up 28 years at Ferno (UK), Ellis is often asked: “How can you work for the same company for so long?” But he doesn’t see it that way.

“I’ve actually worked for five managing directors and now I’m the managing director. I’ve worked for five different companies because they all run it differently. And I run it differently. There’s no two ways about that.”

Jon Ellis Factfile

Title: Managing Director, Ferno (UK)

Date of birth: 02/02/1968

Place of birth: Bradford

Education: Mechanical engineering at Bradford College; DMS management studies and MBA at Huddersfield University.

Last book read: Richard Branson’s Business Stripped Bare

Car driven: Jaguar XF

First job: Sub-contract electrical labourer

Favourite holiday destination: I’m torn between two: Safari in Kenya and Gulet cruise in Turkey.

Favourite song: Coldplay, Viva la Vida

Most proud of: Achievements in my career to date.