‘I’m here to run the business in the best way this business can run,’ says Nevil Trotter, who joined Norville last September after the business was acquired by Inspecs in July.
Norville, a much-loved lens manufacturer within the sector, was placed into administration last year with the unfortunate result of 133 employees being made redundant. Norville’s role in the industry as a lens manufacturer who could produce what others could not was presumed to be in danger, but the £2.4m purchase of the business put a stop to this.
New managing director Trotter is keen to emphasise that Norville will continue to provide the most complex lens options, but stresses the company cannot operate profitably through this niche alone.
‘Being able to fulfil those exceptional dispenses is absolutely the heart of the business, but there are certain strings of that Norville DNA that we need to bring into the modern world,’ he says. ‘There’s part of the culture that we need to leave behind. The obsession with expensive technical solutions over the needs of the customer was the wrong balance and didn’t make commercial sense.’
Prior to the business entering administration, Norville had long been the first port of call when a practitioner needed a complex lens with 12 dioptres of prism, for example. ‘The business had got to a point where that was all people would use them for,’ explains Trotter, ‘but that’s just not enough to run a business on, there’s not enough of that kind of work.’
Trotter calls this a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘When you’re known for this kind of work you only get this exceptionally difficult stuff. It isn’t easy and so it takes more time,’ he says. Norville now plans to build up its manufacturing volume to supplement its more complex work, something that Trotter is no stranger to.
Career to date
Trotter came to Norville from Specsavers where he worked for 13 years, most recently as a partner and director of group manufacturing and distribution technologies. But this forms only part of his extensive experience.
‘I’ve dedicated my life to running businesses, it’s what I do,’ he says, ‘I started off in the factory and I’ve never really left that. I’ve just had more senior jobs in running operational businesses.’
Trotter began his career working as an apprentice for four years in the defence industry as a tool and gauge maker. He then moved from his home in the North-East to the Midlands where he trained for a degree. Moving across the UK in various roles at factories was the next step before he took a position running a business that built black cabs. After that, Trotter moved to Devon and ran a factory producing luxury yachts before joining Specsavers.
Working in manufacturing for the UK giant was where he really cut his teeth in optics: ‘Specsavers took a gamble on me really because I’d been out of high-volume manufacturing for a long time at that point. I ran one of their labs and took it from 400 jobs a week to 6,000 a week, which really taught me a lot. Optics, like any industry, has its own language and once you understand that everything is fine.’
For the last four years of his time with Specsavers, Trotter moved into a central role for the company: ‘I worked a lot on integrated business systems and the set-up of factories, especially the factory in Hungary. One of the last things I did before coming to Norville was designing a system in Hungary to run 100,000 glaze jobs a week.’
Norville had always been on Trotter’s radar as an interesting company and when he met Robin Totterman, CEO of Inspecs, he became intrigued with the project. ‘The job role came up and really interested me as something that I could change for the good. I love the idea of taking something that’s broken and fixing it, I love a challenge. That’s bread and butter to me. What surprised me, though, was how old fashioned it was.’
Building and modernising
Trotter’s wide-ranging experience with companies across the manufacturing sector has provided him with insights around what is needed to bring a business into the modern world. He believes most of his role revolves around creating a culture: ‘My job is all about culture change. That means building a team, creating a new outlook and establishing the right values.’
Culture change can create a foundation to build a business from, and Inspecs has decided to do exactly that. As well as buying Norville, Inspecs has committed £2.5m in investment to relocate the old premises in the centre of Gloucester to a purpose-built facility five miles away. ‘It’s not that much bigger than the current factory’s footprint,’ says Trotter, ‘but it allows it be much more automated. There’s a building with offices, an integrated warehouse and fully automated line feeds so that our volume can go through the automated digital lines.
Norville’s old facility in Gloucester
‘We also have a whole area dedicated to traditional hard tools, glass and plastic lenses. Twenty percent of the operational footprint is still dedicated to producing things in the traditional fashion where we have the ability to manipulate and work both sides of the lens.’
The new facility has also been paid for to modernise the working conditions for Norville’s employees, representing an investment in people. Close to 30 staff in Gloucester were retained at Norville following Inspecs’ purchase of the business, which also led to the closure of its facility in Bolton. Staff numbers are now back up at around 80 employees, however, and new breakout facilities, dedicated lockers and an organised tray system are all intended to help employees enjoy their work without distractions. Gaps have also been left in the new facility’s floorplan with £5m earmarked for investment over the next few years.
A family feel has always defined Norville, but Trotter believes that for the business to modernise it is best for the old guard to take a step back. This does not necessitate a removal of the family feel, however, just the addition of some new faces. ‘We’ve kept the right talent in terms of being able to produce and do exceptional things, but the decision to bring in fresh blood with the right vision is the right recipe for Norville.’
Of Norville’s six-person management team, only purchasing director Robin Hughes and technical director Sean Donnachie have been retained. The rest of the team has been brought in by Trotter with varying levels of optical experience to modernise the business. Paul Jones, the new head of sales and marketing who joined from Hoya at the start of the year, has been working on simplifying Norville’s offerings to its customers by producing accessible glaze packages from the extensive catalogue of products.
Trotter hopes that his, and his team’s, effort put into modernising the company will allow Norville’s customers to reap the rewards of a fully-integrated business. ‘I just want Norville to stop having to make excuses. I don’t want anymore “Yes, Norville can make it, but…”. I know we can make the most complicated lenses in the country and I know we can make those within our four walls. The Norville name deserves to take its place back at the high table of British optics and to do that customers have to be our focus.’