Using expertise from Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) East Midlands to develop its business strategy for the next five years, along with support to streamline its operations, Killamarsh-based La Beeby is now looking to build on this and also get a foothold into the export market.

La Beeby's managing director Dave Cottrell said: "We had come to the end of a three-year plan and needed expert manufacturing advice to translate our ideas for future growth in a coherent strategy to move the company forward without compromising our high customer service standards."

Dave Cottrell approached the East Midlands Development Agency (emda) funded MAS East Midlands for support in 2006. The company was assisted by MAS practitioner, Brian Graham who helped the company to fulfil its potential in the further education (FE) market

"There are 600 further education colleges in the UK and uniforms and beauty kits are mandatory for students enrolling on beauty therapy courses, so there's a big potential market out there to tap into," said Dave.

"MAS helped facilitate our plans for becoming market leaders in this area as well as guiding our planning on how to penetrate the same market with the customised beauty kits we were developing."

Part of the company's new growth strategy involves exploiting the export market for the uniforms. Early research indicates that there is a global demand for the La Beeby brand and the company is in the process of formalising this concept.

Dave, a former teacher who joined the company in 1995 after a period directing for NASC (now MLS), the largest soccer camp company in the world, added: "We already have a number of foreign customers in Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway and Spain, but we're about to start our market research in earnest – intelligence already tells us that the US could be a massive untapped market and in Europe the competition is limited, so there's plenty of scope for expansion overseas."

La Beeby was born when its sister company, Corporate Trends, which designs and supplies uniforms for the health and fitness clubs and spas, was approached by client Cannons to dress its beauty therapists.

Dave explained: "Our reputation spread quickly and it didn't take us long to realise there was a large gap in the market for supplying good quality and stylish beauty wear at reasonable prices. The FE colleges were a perfect target –and from securing three college customers in 2003, we've just become the market leader in this area with a 36% share and contracts with 210 colleges."

With MAS's help and strong brand awareness within the colleges, Dave's company has already secured orders from six colleges for beauty kits. And with a phased sales drive over the next five years, La Beeby is looking to secure contracts with a total of 100 colleges by 2013.

As part of the expansion programme, Dave asked MAS to help him get the right tools in place to handle the new business coming in without getting bigger premises, relying on temporary staff or compromising service standards.

Brian Graham from MAS said: "Dave and his staff had experienced a difficult and very busy two years trying to keep up with all the extra orders using the out-of-date systems.

"We mapped their internal processes from the minute an order comes in to when it leaves the building to find the most efficient route for processing. Improvements, which included introducing an online ordering system, meant we could cut the order processing time down from 10 minutes to just three which is a massive improvement when you're talking about processing and delivering 70,000 orders on time."

Dave added: "We couldn't have gone on growing and delivering excellent customer service without making some radical changes. This cost cutting exercise has already saved us over £40,000 in labour costs."

La Beeby is 100% employee-owned and employs 23 people from its offices on the Norwood Industrial Estate in Killamarsh.

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