Phil Jones, Managing Director, Brother UK, has gone from running a pub to running a £112 million ($140/€132 million) company.
Manchester Evening News reported that Jones was born in Slough and has a business diploma but as a young man decided not to go to university and instead became a manager of an East End pub which was a minefield of drug dealing and violence causing him to decide to make a career change.
Jones said: “It was like being in an actual episode of EastEnders and I realised the danger money, or salary, wasn’t worth it. The night after we were set on fire I realised life isn’t really about this and I decided to find something else.”
This is when he was recruited as an assistant to a “successful sales leader” selling photo copiers in the city. After falling out of love with London Jones moved to Siemens Nixdorf where he was “tipped off” about a job in sales at Brother which is how he came to work for Brother UK. “One thing I’d say about this company is that, [thank] heavens, it is used to innovating because it’s been around for over 100 years,” said Jones.
The company has “not only seen off recessions but world wars. It has survived just about every harsh environment, whether that be politically, environmentally or technologically.” Jones is passionate about the company’s history as well as its future and talked about Brother starting up in 1908 as a sewing machine company by two brothers who made hats for “workers in the paddy fields”.
“That’s really where it started,” Jones explained, “We are now a conglomerate businesse, with many interests in many portfolios.” Brother “operate 17 production sites and more than 50 sales sites in 44 countries across the world”.
Jones worked his way up the ladder from a salesman in 1994 to Managing Director in 19 years and is in charge of Brother UK which employs 200 people and the sales teams sell in excess of £500,000 ($629,326/€590,748) each per year.
Brother Europe is also based in Greater Manchester and earns in excess of one billion euros ($1.07billion) a year. Jones said that the reason for Brothers success is: “We have good strength in our technology and it is the way we are organised. We are also a very fluid company, we work quickly. We are almost the opposite of what people sometimes perceive large organisations to be.
“They perceive them to be slow, […], slow to make decisions, slow to react to market and we’re not that at all. We are quick, customer focused, our engineers in Japan can react very quickly and our production processes can too.”
The challenges for the future according to Jones are to ”keep raising the bar and continue being a dynamic company that young people can invest a career” as well as investing in robotics.