What is the secret to Volution's strong stock market performance?

We spoke to Volution CEO Ronnie George about the company's strong growth since launching on the stock market seven years ago.

Volution fits the profile of a model company with its strong cash flow, pioneering Research and Development arm (R&D) and its insatiable hunger for acquisitions.

We spoke to Volution CEO Ronnie George, who has been at the helm of the company since 2012,  about what makes the ventilation provider successfully tick and how it has gone on to become such a strong market performer since its launch on the stock exchange seven years ago.

People are the biggest driver of the Crawley company's success, according to the Volution CEO Ronnie George, who says that having a strong culture is key to binding employees together around a common goal.

"I'm a huge advocate of internal promotion, he said.

"I always think it is a travesty when we have to go outside to fill one of our vacancies  because this means we have failed our existing employees.

"We trade with the strap-line - Heathy Air Sustainably - and I think that is such an important message to employees and we have endeavoured to galvanise our employees around that ambition."

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SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY 

Volution's sustainability strategy is built on three pillars with the first centred around helping people who use their products become more energy efficient, the second involves reducing the amount of plastics that it uses in the production and the third focuses company employees on decreasing the amount of energy used.

Volution says 70 per cent of their products will help people reduce the energy that they use by 2025 while 90 per cent of the products that they make by the same date will be made from a recycled source.

Ronnie George said: "We need hard metrics that we can measure on a daily basis to let us know how we are doing and these two targets do that.

"A lot of what we do is from plastics and when I think back to what happened to plastic bags in supermarkets five years ago, I don't want us to become persona non grata because we are manufacturing products made with plastics.

"We measure our carbon intensity as a proportion of revenue and we have been on a steep fall over the past six years. This is about running our facilities more efficiently, using photovoltaics to generate electricity and improving the efficiency of our buildings.

"Sustainability can result in improved profitability as it is about eliminating waste."

BUILDING A COMPANY CULTURE

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Having a sustainability vision embedded within the DNA of a company can, according to Ronnie, attract staff in a competitive skills marketplace and also create a motivated and aligned workforce which has a positive impact on the company's bottom line.

He said: "Having a sustainable vision does help us attract staff but it has to be authentic.

"The worst thing we could do would be to attract talent to the organisation and they feel it is not as authentic as they believed it would be.

"That's important to me. We have to capture everyone's hearts and minds and that is a journey and there is a lot of work to be done throughout the company to bring this vision to life.

"Having this vision comes through in our market leading results and they have not been achieved by accident. We have great people who are mobilised by a common cause. It works really well."

ACQUISITION

Volution has been on the acquisition trail since 2012 and in the last financial year alone the company acquired four companies.

These acquisitions have, according to Ronnie George, added to Volution's toolkit and capabilities.

He said: " I hope we can continue to consolidate quite a fragmented market in Europe and grow well organically as there is a whole raft of building regulations coming into the market.

"The group is hugely cash generative and we have been acquisitive off the back of our strong cash generation.

With such a fast pace of growth does the company's culture not become diluted?

Not so, says Ronnie, who argues that the arrival of new companies in the Volution stable has enriched the company's cultural mix.

He said: "I don't think we have ever looked at an acquisition opportunity and thought culturally that it wouldn't fit.

"I think sometimes there are gaps but I believe if we are looking to acquire a company and the company isn't aligned with what we do then that's probably an opportunity to improve things.

"The culture of our company is diverse thanks to the companies we have acquired . You have company culture and then you have country culture and I think having this mix of different cultures is enriching for us."

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R&D 

Having a strong R&D wing has been key to Volution's performance and the company's R&D focus fits well with its acquisition approach.

"From a technology and R&D perspective, we coordinate resources centrally and I believe this gives us a scale advantage over our competitors who are generally smaller and local.

"We build on this scale advantage with innovation and we have developed a really strong network of expertise.

"Our innovation pipeline grows each time we acquire something and we also acquire a whole raft of new learning and experience."

STOCK MARKET PERFORMANCE

Volution, whose stock ticker is cleverly called FAN, has gone from a £300m stock market valuation at its IPO to one of circa £1bn today with shareholders enjoying 13 per cent compounded growth in earnings since listing in 2014.

Ronnie George said: "My philosophy is not to overcomplicate things and a lot of the businesses that we acquired are great companies who want to be part of our group.

"We then nurture, stimulate and inspire the leadership of the companies that we acquire.

"I always say to my shareholders that we have got a winning formula that we just need to roll out and perfect year on year."