Booth Welsh’s marketing journey

Back in December 2023 Booth Welsh kindly allowed us to interview them about their marketing journey and how it has transformed their business. Watch the video or read the transcript below to learn all about it.

As well as their marketing journey and all it entailed, they spoke about the NMIS Digital Process Manufacturing Centre they are hosting on their site that was about to launch back then. Find out about the now-up-and-running DPMC.

You can also read more about their environmental sustainability here.

 

 

Transcript:

Samantha Tonge: Samantha Tonge from Labrakita Marketing with one of my expert interviews, my first ever face-to-face with Booth Welsh. could you introduce yourselves and explain what Booth Welsh is and what you do 

Martin Welsh: I'm Martin Welsh. Managing Director of Booth Welsh, an engineering services business. Started in. 1989. We have a multidisciplinary workforce and work across a number of sectors. About half of what we do is in chemical sciences, but there's a big mixture of different sectors we employ just over 300 people at the moment, working mainly in the UK.

Aimee Doole: I'm Aimee, I look after strategy, marketing and communications for the company. I've been with the business for around. 11, 12 years now. We've seen a lot of change, a lot of pivots, a lot of change in dynamics, as part of our priorities and objectives, which is exciting. Keeps things very fresh. 

I look after the brand both inside and out. So, a lot around stakeholder engagement, internal comms, our website marketing, and particularly our brand culture inside. Looking at. how our people can get involved behind our purpose and mission, and have a co-created approach to how we operate.

Samantha: We were chatting at an event recently, and you were talking about your journey into marketing. Maybe you could tell me a little bit of the history about your journey into marketing, how you went about that, and how it's changed things for you.

Martin: I think for me it's mainly a story of how the world has evolved since we started the business in 1989. I took over 2009. At that point, we had grown on the back of reputation. We'd grown the business well, but we were starting to get bigger. We're starting to do more technical work, more involved in future-led technologies, and we had to start to build the brand. 

We had a problem, which was the first task I'd given to Aimee when she joined, when people were asked “who do you work for?” they would say, Booth Welsh. And the retort was “Booth who?”. So, Aimee's first job was to get rid of the “Booth who?” To really get the name known and the brand known, and I think we've done that.

Aime: Hopefully, it's been 12 years. I've been involved in the company a good number of years and seen a lot of change in that time. I studied marketing and management at The University of Strathclyde, so I have a fantastic grounding in marketing theory, teamwork, campaigns, projects, etc. But you don't really know what you're letting yourself in for. until you come into a company and you actually have to, dig deep, think under the skin of things. 

I joined a business in an ideal way, where I managed to gain insights and dig deeper. I joined as an intern and was able to spend a year working on my dissertation. I was able to utilise the business as a case study and have interviews with staff, and look at where the brand was and where it wanted to go. It was a bit of a social experience for both you and the company, wasn't it Martin? Setting that great brand reputation, but also look at brands and more model technologies.

Social media was just becoming a thing that we were talking about, we don't think of it now as never being in our lives. But, there was a lot of opportunity that I knew I could, look to drive forward. Like me, Martin would be quite open in terms of what we explored and experimented with to build the brand, which has been a fun journey. 

Martin: I think the main reason for that was that we didn't have marketing before that point. We were starting with a blank sheet of paper. How could we build the brand? What tools would we use? I think when we started to look at what was coming next, we had just bought the business from the family. So we were no longer a family business. We had to try and portray the business more as an SME and less as a family-owned business.

I'm not saying family-owned isn't good, but it was a brand that we were trying to build bigger. sometimes I think the family tag was making us look smaller. One of the first things we wanted to do was to try to establish an SME brand and make the logo well-known. 

Samantha: It's really interesting to hear that it was "Booth who" and changing that. So, you were not just thinking about the short-term, because if you'd been working on reputation, presumably you were still getting work in, it was the longer-term growth and getting known wider. 

Martin: As a new management team, we are keen to grow the business, cover more ground, reach more customers, because we've got a really good service here. It's a matter of making sure we had the market for the customers. And as Aimee said, it was a bit of a social experiment. We didn't know how successful it was going to be. 

We even drew our own logos before we had marketing!

Aimee: Brand identity and logos was one of the first things. I think that the logo had served the company well, it was over 10 years. And it was across all the vans and across all the signage and sites, et cetera. Identity is so important in brand and making it recognisable. We went through a rebrand process, and that was at the same time as our new website. There was a website in place, but probably not the best design, built in-house. 

Martin: I remember going to my dad, and my dad was great at leading the business in the early years, and I went to him, said, “We need a website”. And he said, “what do we need a website for?”. At that time, it was ambiguous. You didn't really know an engineering services business would ever need a website. A lot of retail companies had them. It was hard to pitch that we needed to spend money on the website, so it was done internally. 

Aimee: We were able to lean a little bit on Scottish Enterprise, for example. We got a bit of funding for our first externally built website and connected with experts who could help us through that initial journey and ensure it was built fit for purpose. Because it's all very well spending a lot of money on our website as long as is does what you need it to do.
 
Samantha: I've certainly come across quite a few clients who have got a really pretty website that they've unfortunately spent an awful lot of money on. But it doesn't work for their target audience. They can't navigate it 

Aimee: I think that came at a great time when we were starting to look at the content. For us, looking at bolstering our website, digital presence with strong LinkedIn, Twitter X, whatever it is. It was Twitter at the time. Facebook as well. Looking at boosting the brand through digital comms. and that was a big next phase of evolution for us in terms of the brand piece.

Martin: The brand really ran in parallel with our sales efforts. We did have one or two salespeople that came and went with the business. But the one thing that has persisted is marketing. We don't have any direct sales now. We sell through our leadership team. We rely heavily on the brand building and the reputation that we have in the market. And a lot of that we've been able to do now is because we've had such a consistent increase in how we've built the brand. 

Aimee: I think that points to a lot of our client evolution as well. A lot of our clients we've had for over 25 years. and we've had to pivot and change our services and that brand perception as we go with it. 

Martin: We've been going for 34 years, and so we've had to pivot on a lot of occasions. you can imagine having marketing and strategy as it is now, running side by side with how we deliver the business. The minute we have to react to a change, like we had to this year, marketing is right up to speed. They're ready to make the changes. to position the business differently to make sure we continue to get the right type of business at the right time. So that's a key role for us.

Samantha: That is music to my ears because you've really hit nail on the head you can't really have a marketing strategy if it's not aligned with the overarching strategy.

Aimee: It's about connecting it to that bigger piece. There's a lot of stuff you learn at university. I remember when I first joined the company, and I always laugh at this, my very first day, I knew that the company wanted to expand and build on strong customer relationships, and I literally brought a marketing textbook in and looked up customer relationship management. I went to the index, and I flicked through, and I remember showing Martin a model. But it's translating what you know into a practical context, and that takes a bit of time. 

Martin: We had a strong business, so there was a soft landing as we brought marketing and Aimee in particular into the business. that gave us time to get the marketing competence up to speed with where we wanted to go with the business. Then it just took off from there. It is something that's pivotal. It's critical to us being successful. we are doing a fourth phase of evolution, and marketing has been beside us for the last three. Strategy's been key. And now, as technology starts to ramp up too, we've positioned ourselves more towards sustainability and digitalisation, with AI coming along. 

We've got all the tools now that we need to grow the business in this next phase. And marketing properly and having the right strategy is invaluable. 

Samantha: The first step was. Booth Welsh, not "Booth who". I assume it's evolved because you have a balance between your lead generation and your brand awareness. 
Especially since if you don't have a sales team as such, that's got to be essential, hasn’t it? 

Aimee: We can rely on the power of the brand because of the customer relationships that we have are long-term. We're not selling widgets; we're not selling something online. It's the reputation that’s absolutely crucial. Marketing has really got to build that in terms of every activity and touch point across the business, whether that's staff, whether that's the environments that we're in, whether it's our content online, the whole marketing mix is crucial 

Samantha: One thing that I've noticed from your communications and walking around here today (I love to see because so many engineering companies skip over) is thinking about the internal marketing as well as the external and thinking about, employer branding.

Martin: It's something that's been, critical to our success. You can imagine when we bought the business from the family in 2011, that's a big change for people who once worked in a family business and then agree into shareholder in business. And then we had the next evolution when we sold the business in 2014 to an Australian company.

Your internal marketing and your comms and your engagement with your staff needs to be spot on to make sure that everybody's still with you on that journey. nine years later when we decided to buy the business back once again, you need that level of engagement so that you still have a business to buy when you're buying it. 

And people need to stay with you. We've got a really dedicated staff, but a lot of that's to do with us keeping them up to date with what's happening. We're open, honest, and transparent with our comms. 

Aimee: And there's a brand ambassador piece that really comes into play here. As Martin said, we don't have a sales team that's out there driving leads. It's the people who know the business best who are actually working hands-on, on sites that are building that brand for the sharp end of the whole customer relationship piece, which is great. 

We have a communication strategy on site. It's called a hundred per cent reach. This is the idea that as we grow, we want to make sure that people know what we do, and a hundred per cent of the messages reach a hundred per cent of our audience a hundred per cent of the time. So regardless of their role, of their background, where they're located, what the message is, we want to make sure that we're creating that great platform and culture of open, transparent, comms so people can do their jobs in the best way and, and effectively, I suppose, sell the business in the best way and, and help grow it and improve it as a whole. 

Samantha: That makes a lot of sense. there's been a lot of research on exactly what you're talking about. A genuinely brand-focused company where everyone understands the brand and where they fit into it, makes on average, double the margins of competitors in the same industry. It makes sense that you are growing by thinking about that aspect of it as well. 

Aimee: I agree. Next phase of that for us is our purpose and mission statement, which is “through collaboration, engineer a better future”. That was co-created with our staff post-pandemic. Martin was really keen to get our full team together, to really think about, where we've been, where we are, then where we're going. Having people support really helped to create this idea that if you've got that buy-in, if you've helped shape the culture and you've got a real hand in it, then you're more likely to sustain it and build it. That's good sort of strong story in that space too.

Martin: We first did that in 2018 after we'd started to focus on staff engagement. Again, that was led by marketing strategy to make sure that we had everybody beside us, and then in 2020, we did it again. But you really need to keep that heartbeat. It needs to be, for us, it's about two years. We needed to be prepared to change the plans because we don't know. anybody who has led a business in the last five years. It's been such a continuous time to try and lead a business and remain successful. 

But having the staff behind you and having them with you, when you create a strategy, then you've definitely got the buy-in when it comes to delivering it, having them involved in each of the strategy pillars such that, you can see how closely linked strategy and marketing are. For me it is one and the same.

Samantha: Sometimes I go to a client and they think it needs to be just the leadership team driving. If it's a huge company, you might or might not be able to get everyone in the room, that's not realistic, but different people from different departments, not necessarily the most senior people. Apart from anything else, it's quite often a learning experience, the leadership team quite often says, "Oh, I didn't know our product did that. I didn't know that was important to our customers." 

Martin: It's one of those life lessons when you realise that the cleverest people don't sit in the boardroom. We had a board of maybe six, seven people, but when we started looking at strategy with 36 people, we had a much better impact on the success of the business than we did previously. The board isn't the place to look for the best ideas all the time. If you open that net wider, you'll get a much better strategy, and you get the engagement. 

Aimee: And I think now more than ever, the pace of change in the world and digital natives, Gen Z, there's a lot that people are coming to us because we now have five generations in the workforce, which is crazy when you think about it. We've quite a focus on optimising that age range across the workforce. Looking at mentoring programs, even reverse mentoring programs, because there's a lot to learn across all different skill sets. You have to be open to learning and building in those new perspectives and ways of doing things to stay ahead. That's been a key part of our strategy as well.

Samantha: That's fantastic. The more diverse ideas are coming in, the better the ideas are going to be at the end of the day.
 
Martin: It's empowering people to make decisions and empower them to bring ideas forward, and not being frightened, that's the idea of fail fast. It really does work, though. You can very easily now try an idea and decide whether it's going to build the business or not. 

Samantha: That's brilliant. and again, that comes back to employer branding. If people feel engaged, they feel like they've had that input, they're going to probably stay for longer. 

Aimee: It's connecting people to a bigger purpose, isn't it? I think 2020 was a real shake-up for people to think, How do I work? What am I doing? And that's something that we recognise in terms of that whole co-created approach. And I think that as a business, working a lot in the engineering technology space, we have a responsibility to ensure that we can leave a lasting impact. The businesses that we work with, the community that we're a part of, and think about how we can develop more purpose-driven ways of working.

One of our newer strategy pillars is looking at community wealth building. There's a lot of fantastic things going on within this local area. How can we support our brand to be a Beacon business that is sharing best practice, that's bringing different businesses from different areas together. And thinking about how we can build Ayrshire in particular to be a of powerhouse for Net Zero and, showcasing all the great stuff has happened. 

Samantha: When I came into reception, you were talking about the work you're doing for charity, for example. 

Aimee: We've been doing a bit of work recently on looking at our social impact and our social value because it isn't just about creating profit for shareholders all the time. We've had a real conscious shift in looking at the wider impact that we can have as a business. we talk a lot about triple bottom line. People plan and profit, you've got to make profit, but how can you engage with people when you're doing that in the wider community, and really do that in a responsible way. That's something that as a brand, we've put a big focus on. 

Martin: I think the other thing is now the company's 100% owned by the management team, we've all bought into this. Previously, we were part of our global organisation that's shareholder-driven, with a different set of values; we gradually see that divide happening. We have got a lot more freedom now being privately owned, but we're still a business of a good size, so we can make a good difference in this community. a lot of this has happened after the pandemic. People are focused more on place as well as people, planet, and profit. P and I think that we've got responsibility as a business in this area to do our part, and we'll grasp that. 

Aimee: Especially when people are literally working all over the world, you've now got that opportunity to unite people under that common brand, which is challenging, but it's nice, isn't it?

Samantha: That's fantastic to hear. And, I think in terms of the long term, if even if you take the morality outta it for a second, in terms of the long term, that's going to be better for everyone, including businesses, if everyone thought like that. It's a bit of shame that some of the really large businesses have shareholders that just want to take all the profit out. 

Martin: Not everybody thinks this way, but I think we are living through a transition. We've certainly transitioned quite dramatically since 2020 as we've gone through the pandemic and living through this next partly post pandemic, as we start to give people flexibility of work. That's about keeping the brand strong and engaging. We need to trust the staff to work 60% of the office, 40% from wherever I, and still deliver the business, and that is working. And that's all about building the engagement in the brand. 

We added a hundred people to the business during the pandemic, and we couldn't fully induct them all. Everyone was working from a distance, and we were doing videos twice a week, three times a week, to try and keep the staff motivated and  growing a business during that period. You can't do it without the culture. You can't do it without having everybody pulling their weight. 

It was a real testament to what we had built prior to the pandemic (not that we knew it was coming), but our technology ran in parallel with the strategy. We were already digitally enabled by the time we went into the pandemic, and that helped the IT department allow us to take the equipment home and work safely and defend against cyber, et cetera. And they were all taken care of. So we were ready to be a growth business during that phase, and we're continuing that. 

Aimee: That phrase I really love, which is used a lot, is “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. You need to work on that first. I think we did a lot of that groundwork earlier on to look at our workplace innovation as a whole and how we get people behind us. Then that's where you get the magic. In terms of champion and driving forward with the strategy.
 
Samantha: That's a fantastic phrase because you get nowhere if you don't have that culture. It sounds like you were able to not just ride the storm but grow because you are that forward-thinking. Whatever disaster could happen at any time, it's a lot easier to deal with if you are ahead of the curve in terms of technology and culture. 

Martin: I think the other thing is to trust the management team. Giving them autonomy when they were managing teams from their kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms. Having the culture and knowing that they're good enough to do that. It's a great comfort as you go through troubled times.

Aimee: You never knew we'd been in that position, but you have to adapt. You have to make it work. 

Martin: Another excellent example of that. We went to buy the business back at the start of this year, so last December was much different to this December. After three months, we had a business, we bought it back. If the people we had hadn't continued to do the day-to-day whilst in the background, we wouldn't have had a business to buy. It's absolutely critical that you have the engagement of the team.

Samantha: And it sounds like you continue to push it. I've been made redundant three times during my career because marketing was always the first thing to be cut at the first sign of trouble, which is, not what you've done, clearly.

Aimee Doole: And we've added it to the team. I've got a great team that really support our objectives to move things forward. I suppose, proving the value. is always going to be challenging, Tap into that real strategic piece. Not thinking that, it's all about textbooks and theory, you need to adapt your style and approach. Listen to your market. Go out there and work a lot with North Ayrshire Council, for example, a lot of the local authorities, Scottish Enterprise, to understand the wider landscape and how we as a business need to adapt. Fit what's coming. and adapt our offerings there, which has been really fruitful for is. In fact, we're going be the host of a, a new demonstration technology centre 

Martin: Yes. The Digital Process Manufacturing Centre is a demonstration centre for digital technology in the process industries. Funded by the UK government, North Ayrshire Council, the Scottish Government, Strathclyde University, NMIS, and CPI. It is a real mixture and collaboration of different people from different parts of education, industry, and government, all coming together and developing a centre here to the benefit of everybody in Scotland and nationally.

They'll be able to come in and get their hands on technology. They'll walk through the front door, and they'll see our excellent branding. But for me, it really is a big feather in our cap that we can all start here.

Aimee: It's like a marketing dream. 

Martin: Opening in February of 24. 

Aimee: It's not just about pushing the brand out there; it's about listening and making the right decisions, understanding. Who you are and what you represent to everyone. you have to understand the market in order to do that. And I think that's something we probably had a challenge on over the years because we do a lot, it has been difficult to tell our story in a way that people understand, there is a bit of focus next year and maybe more storytelling animations. We choose to share a lot about our culture across our social media channels. And having employees talk more about their achievements and their role within their operations.

And supporting our customers to be more efficient, more compliant, and safer. I think that's a fantastic story that our employees do tell, and we just need to continue to make sure the volume's always turned up very high on that. 

Samantha: Humans relate to stories more than they do a company. If you are showing your people, customers start to feel they know them. 

Aimee: And we are a people business. So, we need to make sure our people are engaged, know what we do and their role, and want to work for a company like Booth Welsh. Because we don't have products as such, it's really all about people. So, it's crucial. 

Samantha: You've already started to answer this one, but what's next for Booth Welsh in marketing? 

Martin: As we start to look at what is coming next, nothing will ever be as slow as it is today. We do need to keep moving forward as fast as we can. AI is going to be a game changer in every area, whether it's the services we're selling or how we operate the business internally. Large focus on technology. We attended our conference two weeks ago, and Industry 5.0 now.  Not even finished four yet. Starting to look at five. 

There are some very interesting changes as to what's going to be included in Industry five and how it differs from Industry 4. So, we're positioning ourselves to be ready for that next transition and to help our clients. Sustainability is a large part of it, too. We try to be ahead of that curve. 

We've got carbon accounts, which we did over a year ago. Because we understand not only the difference that it makes to know what we use. you can't control what you can't measure. So, we decided we would measure early and also to help our clients with that journey, they're going to inherit our carbon footprint, so we need to be able to tell that story and show how we're controlling it, but also to help other local businesses.

Aimee: It's that remaining relevant piece, isn't it? So many tools at our fingertips now, but as you say, it's staying close to your customer. It's about looking at what those future trends and requirements are going to be. with AI coming. This could hit us all in an unbelievably disruptive way. So what is our relevance? What should the brand be? I don't actually know if I really know the answer to that question. Looking at being more human-centric in terms of what we do, being more sustainable, being more purpose-led, the whole balance to the people, planet and profit, and doing that in the best way that we possibly can as a business.  I think we'll stand in quite good stead for the future to stay close to those values. 

Martin: There's also our new product. So, as a services business, we've never had a product, and anybody who has a product business, I've got a lot of admiration for them because I now know how difficult it is to launch a product. We have an energy monitoring product, which looks at how you use your electricity, mainly, but also some of your gas, inside a facility that allows you to help control it. So really, that idea of looking where you are using all your power or all your carbon and being able to control it, and that's something we've put together over the last two years. we're now at a stage where we're ready to do pilots.

There are really good lessons. we learnt very early when we put it in. There are large air conditioning units here that are on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. So, it was an easy low hanging fruit. Put the timer in and there are really useful insights you can get once you have the data. 

Samantha: That's been so interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you. and, thank you everyone for watching.

Interviewer: Samantha Tonge, Managing Director, Labrakita Marketing