The EOT has given us a great opportunity to continue the Jephsons story. We can keep pushing the business forward and growing it to become more successful than it ever has been. Wayne Stringfellow & Ben Tomlinson - Jephsons Shopfitters
The EOT has given us a great opportunity to continue the Jephsons story. We can keep pushing the business forward and growing it to become more successful than it ever has been.
Jephsons is an award-winning interior fit-out specialist that has been providing first-class services to the food retail, hospitality and catering industries for over 40 years. With the help of Shorts, they recently transferred to an Employee Ownership Trust.
The Shorts Corporate Finance and Tax teams spoke to Wayne Stringfellow, Sales and Marketing Director and Ben Tomlinson, Business Manager, about their experiences as Jephsons staff following the sale of the business to an EOT.
I’ve been at Jephsons for over 30 years, so I know it from its early days right to where it is now. When you’ve worked with Jephsons, you are answerable to somebody, but you’re also your own boss. An EOT makes you look at things slightly differently from a business management point of view, but the actual work element is not really different, because we did that anyway.
As a management team, we have largely been left to our own devices. We were making the key decisions – the owners trust us.
He [the previous owner] is still there to counsel us. If we’re struggling with something, he is a sounding board. But we are now in charge of our own destiny more than we have ever been. We know we can push this business forwards and bring the people with us.
This type of arrangement is obviously designed to get buy in from everybody. I think we’ll see the real push there when they start to see bonuses. That’s when we’ll start to see people thinking “they weren’t just spinning us a line, this benefits all of us!”
Most organisations are structured so that when it does well, directors, shareholders, and senior management team benefits from it. Your administrators or people on the shop floor don’t tend to get significant bonuses.
[With an EOT] you’re spreading wealth – the terms of your employment don’t change, your employment continuity doesn’t change, you still come to the same workplace. It’s the same, except your immediate future has been secured, and you could earn more money going forward. I don’t see a downside.
We haven’t seen any downside. With regards to clients, there hasn’t really been a lot of changes. They just want us to deliver a good job, on time, at a good rate. They aren’t concerned about a business structure or who owns it. Ultimately, they’re dealing with Wayne, or they’ve dealing with Dave or the other members of the team. From a transition point of view, things were really easy and straightforward.
If you were to interview our clients, they would probably say they haven’t noticed any difference. That’s good and where it’s supposed to be. It’s been seamless.
The owner naturally has an emotional attachment to the company and wants continuity, which is what the EOT gives you. We could have been bought by a hostile purchaser. I’ve seen it throughout my career.
What generally happens is a company buys another, they’ll keep it running alongside for a period of time. Eventually, they realise they don’t want both businesses, so they get rid of one, and cherry-pick the best parts of the company they bought. The EOT secured everyone’s future.
For the people who are selling the business, it’s great. They could have run off into the sunset with the money, but with an EOT they get the money and the legacy. It demonstrates that the owners do care about the company and its staff.
[The EOT] has also given us a great opportunity of continuing the Jephsons story. We can keep pushing the business forward and growing it to become more successful than it ever has been.
What I would advise anybody selling to an EOT is to get the message across that it is business as usual, that there’s only upsides, and that we’ll all be rowing in the same direction. It’s good for everybody
Jephsons is an award-winning interior fit-out specialist providing first-class services to the food retail, hospitality and catering industries. Their team has over 100 years of combined experience in interior fit outs, and their dedicated estimators and project managers work alongside clients to develop concepts, drawings, and schedules from their fully equipped head office.
You can contact the Jephsons team at [email protected] or by visiting their website.
Back to case studies
