Strong organic growth with good cash generation is the foundation of our business.
A healthy level of growth, alongside our strong balance sheet, allows us to fund a sustainable dividend policy and, importantly, reinvest in our operating companies to secure the organic growth of the future.
These organic investments improve the quality of our operating companies through increasing the depth of our talent pool, geographical expansion, increasing manufacturing capacity and efficiency improvements and innovation. These are the investments that keep our businesses ahead. Cash generation from organic growth also fuels our acquisition ambitions.
Our organic growth activities are focused on high value, fast growing, critical niche opportunities. Our decentralised model allows our local management teams to care about these small, niche opportunities in a way that a more centralised model would not. The investment ideas are generated by our operating company management teams who are close to their end markets and customers. Our lean structure ensures that capital allocation decisions can be made quickly, with appropriate oversight, once the business case is established. This helps empower our employees and it contributes to the Group’s ability to respond to changing market conditions. Our highly empowered local management teams willingly take on high levels of ownership and accountability knowing that they are backed by the resources of a lean, international FTSE250 parent company.
Increasingly we are focused on innovation as a building block for our medium to long-term organic growth. Due to our decentralised model, 99% of our employees are employed by our operating companies, close to our customers, positioning us well to develop new solutions through customer led innovation.