What was the rationale for in-housing the manufacturing?

Judges paid around £10 million for Armfield which was way over. Armfield did not conduct a thorough due diligence process on the data and IPR of the product. What happened over the years was that these three suppliers had basically taken over the design of the product and made changes to products without recording it within Armfield. The Armfield data packs were not up to date, so they were not representative of what was being manufactured externally. They passed the test procedures in the main.

Really?

Armfield doesn't fit Judge's model, which was quite interesting. The more I got into it, the more interesting it became. Most of the Judge's companies are very scientific-based, high technology, low volume, high margin, with few competitors. Armfield was very much high volume - high product count, low volume in a saturated market, with very little sales in the UK. They relied heavily on the US office. The intercompany sales price for the US was the same as the worldwide price list.

Is that why you said it was dressed to be sold?

Yes. I had this conversation with the previous MD, Sean. We got Chris back into the business, and Sean had an idea of trying to get Chris back to see where and how we could improve the business. We had dinner with him a number of times, and he openly admitted that he dressed the business for sale. He took about 2 to 2.5 years before they purchased it to stop investing. He didn't develop the drawing packs or invest in the future of the products, and purely went out on an aggressive sales pitch to improve the turnover, manufacture the margin off of that turnover, then exit the business.