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Entrepreneur: Paul Bradbury, Managing Director
Company: Clayton’s Kitchens Australia
Business type: Design, manufacture and delivery of kitchens and vanity units
Founded: 1981
Turnover: $10M - $50M
Head office: Laverton North, Victoria
Contact details: +61 3 9931 0088
The Clayton’s Kitchens Story
It was very significant that a Clayton’s Kitchens staff member entered her employer in the 2000 City of Wyndham Business Awards. Clayton’s won both “The Business of the Year” and “Manufacture - Large” awards. The judges noted the kitchen design and manufacturing wholesaler’s innovative use of technology to achieve efficiency, the quality of both Clayton’s product and workplace, and the company’s attention to detail.
Managing director Paul Bradbury acknowledges these factors, but emphasises the contribution of his staff first. He says: “I think [that] once you get a good group of people, they make it happen.”
Clayton’s management have learnt how to motivate staff in the manufacturing envrionment. Getting performance begins before staff are even hired: the company Web site’s employment page seeks “submissions from high performing, ambitious and passionate people”. Recruiting people who are already internally motivated is the foundation of a good workforce.
Paul says: “We’re so lucky like that. I think we’ve got the best equipment in the industry. And I think anyone who has experienced the industry appreciates that fact. For a cabinet-making company as busy as we are at the moment, it’s a fairly clean environment with our extraction units around the place taking the dust and fumes away.”
Clayton’s managers also work hard at creating a social atmosphere. In an industry in which people often eat lunch in their cars, or at their desks, or even by their machines, Clayton’s provides a lunchroom with barbecue facilities and drink-dispensing machines.
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Key learning points:
- Staff selection - Selecting and developing great people is important. Well-motivated self-starters need relatively little external motivation.
- Equipment - Provide staff with the best equipment available in your industry. The investment sends a message to your staff that they deserve the best because they are the best.
- Workplace environment - Provide your people with a quality work environment. Emphasising cleanliness and safety as much as productivity tells people that they are valued as much as the bottom line.
- Have fun! - Create a fun, social atmosphere so that people enjoy being at work with one another.
- Quality - Emphasise quality as much as, if not more than, quantity in setting your production standards. It pays your people the compliment that they know quality when they see it.
- Feedback - Monitor people’s performance and give them regular feedback. Let them set their own new targets - and then outperform their own expectations. Give them credit for being the best judges of what they can achieve.
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