Shield Safety Group

Year founded 2003
HQ Location Manchester
Sector Technology
Staff count 160
Turnover £5.7m
Investment in human capital lies at the heart of Manchester-based Shield Safety’s rapid scaling, driving its 50% year-on-year revenue growth over the last three years.
shieldsafety.co.uk

Investing in people pays dividends

Over 15 years, Shield Safety Group has become one of the UK’s top providers of food, fire and health & safety software as a service (SaaS) and services. The company supports some of the biggest brands across the hospitality and retail sectors, including Malmaison, PizzaExpress and Tesco with a clear purpose: “We believe in making safety simple.”

Shield Safety has a 98% customer retention rate and even has a waiting list of people applying for jobs.

Founder and CEO Mark Flanagan attributes the company’s success to the investment in extensive staff training, support and leadership development opportunities. “We’ve adopted the European Foundation for Quality Management excellence model, administered by the British Quality Foundation,” he says.

Flanagan put the framework in place and followed it from day one. It was not, he stresses, “a retrospective approach – we fully adopted it from the beginning”.

We’ve adopted the European Foundation for Quality Management excellence model, administered by the British Quality Foundation.

Mark Flanagan, Shield Safety Group

 

A clear sense of purpose

What’s key is that people understand why they want to work for Shield Safety, as they make the best employees. “Recently, three of our new recruits told me how our culture and business was a million times better than their previous workplace,” adds Flanagan.

Such frameworks are more commonly used by large businesses. This approach is quite unusual for a scaling business like Shield Safety, which has a headcount of 160. But for Flanagan it is one of the reasons his company has been able to grow so quickly – achieving 50% revenue growth for the last three years.

 

Securing local capital support

To help the company grow further, the Greater Manchester Loan Fund, managed by Maven Capital Partners, has backed Shield Safety Group to the tune of £750,000. The funding will help the company create 70 jobs in the local Manchester area.

However, raising funding can be challenging. “It’s not easy to get the right amounts,” he says. “As a scaling business invested in growth, your profits can be low but your revenues high, so it makes it difficult to go to a traditional lender,” he explains.

Shield Safety has applied for an Innovate UK grant and both times “narrowly missed out”. He cites the difficulty in appealing to the strict marking criteria and the limited supply of grants for the number of applicants.

 

Pacing the growth rate

Before its recent Greater Manchester Loan Fund loan, Shield Safety’s scaling rate meant that all its cashflow primarily went back into working capital. “The bigger we get, the bigger contracts we attract along with the risk of late payments,” he explains. “So we have to release working capital.”

Using cashflow for working capital left the company with less available for research and development (R&D) than they would like. Flanagan predicts that without adequate funding it would have taken another two or three years “to be able to get enough money to invest in our planned R&D”. This crucial funding will enable them to roll out the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) product.

For now Flanagan is looking at controlling the growth of the business so it can become even more profitable in the eyes of business lenders. Shield Safety’s next mission is expanding its offering to the manufacturing sector, which is the largest in the UK.


Key Metrics

98%

Customer retention rate

17,307

client sites

98/2%

Domestic/export sales

Sources of capital
Supported By

Related Stories

PHMG
Founder and managing director Grant Reed says PHMG’s journey has been about slow, steady initial growth before “pushing the button to go big”, securing the company’s position as a world leader in audio branding. Read more...
Rosebourne
A group of successful serial entrepreneurs had the well-earned credibility to attract maximum EIS investment for their garden centre business, but raising funds outside the EIS market can be challenging for some growth companies. Read more...
Greenwood Campbell
In the fast-moving world of digital technologies and shifting customer appetite, full-service digital agency Greenwood Campbell maintains a highly fluid approach to its intellectual capital while remaining committed to the human factor. Read more...
Sphere Fluidics
Sphere Fluidics makes cell-analysis systems to help pharmaceutical companies discover new potential blockbusters, and has raised more than £16m of financial capital and grants in eight years. Read more...
Ramsden International
Ramsden International is one of the world’s largest exporters of UK groceries, and since CEO Sean Ramsden took charge it has recorded 15 consecutive years of growth thanks to his skilled team. Read more...
Redington
Redington’s co-founders, Robert Gardner and Dawid Konotey-Ahulu have been deploying a fine blend of social, intellectual and financial capital to drive the consultant’s goal to help make 100m people financially secure. Read more...