Building for 2030: How we are shaping sustainable growth

There comes a point in any growing business where you have to stop, reflect, celebrate what you have achieved and concentrate on what comes next. That process involves asking ourselves a few honest questions. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? Who needs to be involved? And what kind of business do we want to be when we arrive?

That is really what our new 30/30 vision is about. We want to grow Arcade to a £30 million turnover by 2030. It is an ambitious target, but one that pushes us while still feeling achievable.

£30 million by 2030 is the headline, but the what sits behind the target is the most important part of the story. We must make sure that customers get the right experience from us, before, during, and long after the project has been delivered. To do that, we have to have the right people, the right processes and the right culture in place. We, therefore focus on the projects that are right for us, while building the strength and resilience needed for the years ahead.

Our 30/30 vision gives us a clear direction and makes sure our team can see where they fit and how they can come with us every step of the way.

Why now is the time for a clearer plan

Arcade has been in business for more than 50 years and, in that time, we have had to adapt, sometimes quite significantly.

Like many companies in the construction industry, we have had our ups and downs. There have been times when business has been thriving and others when the pipeline has not been where we wanted it to be. But as we grow, it is time to build long-term stability into the way we work.

For us, we have learned that when we give ourselves a clear target and write it down properly, it gives us focus and drives us forward. It gives us an anchor point to keep coming back to and helps us make decisions with more confidence.

Our previous plans saw us set a £5 million target, and we reached it. We did it again with £10 million and reached that too. Now we are doing it with £30 million by 2030, but this time the plan has been built with the senior leadership team with challenge and scrutiny coming from outside the business.

That change in approach matters because a strategy devised only with the Board at the top table will only ever go so far. Building a strategy that your people help shape increases understanding and makes it much more likely to be achieved.

Making the strategy more than words

To take everyone on our growth journey with us, this 30/30 plan has been shared across the whole business.

This has made the process more open, but also more useful, and making everyone accountable to what and how we want to deliver. The people closest to projects, customers and teams have helped shape what the strategy needs to do in practice. Their insight is crucial. They know where the improvements are, what needs to be done, what makes us authentically Arcade and what our customers rightly expect.

We will still be practical, agile, approachable and solution focused. But as we grow, we need stronger systems, clearer processes and better governance to support us.

Growth needs people

Turnover, projects and targets are easy to measure, but people are not. Yet they are central to whether a strategy will work.

Our approach is to develop our own people and give them the opportunity to grow with us. Our executive team, have all built our careers here, and there are further strong examples across the organisation.

Our recently awarded Rising Star, Pawel, started with us as an apprentice and, in just a few years, is running projects. We see him as having the potential to become a very strong project manager and to progress even further.

Design Manager Rob is another whose journey we are particularly proud of. While he did not start out with us, he has flourished in his time here. Since joining, he has completed his degree, become Chartered through CIBSE and continued on to become a CIBSE assessor himself. He is an integral part of our team and an example for all to follow.

In addition, we have electrical apprentices who cut their teeth with us and are now qualified. Klaidas is another. He started as an apprentice, who has recently achieved his NVQ level 2 and is already working rapidly towards an NVQ level 3.

Together, they show both our people and prospective employees that there is a pathway with us. If someone wants to build a career here, there is the opportunity for them to do that.

Through the strategy, our role is to create the right conditions for our people to thrive. It means having the right people in the right roles, with the skills, tools and resources needed to produce their best work and develop with us.

Culture has to show up in real life

Getting the culture right is integral to the success of any business. Our values are respectful, inquisitive, principled and brave, and these show up in the way we work every day.

We want to create an environment where everyone can feel confident to speak up, ask questions, challenge and take the initiative, all while feeling supported in doing so.

That is why investing in personal development, training and progression forms a big part of our strategy. We commit to a level of training spend per person to help build our business. Personal Development Plans are being rolled out across the organisation, success is being recognised and celebrated, and potential future leaders at different levels of the business are participating in ILM Leadership and Management training.

As we have put more focus on culture, we have seen staff turnover fall and more people seeing a way forward with us. It gives the business greater stability as there is a very clear sense of where we are going and how we are going to get there.

In a competitive sector, pay will always be important, but people also want to feel valued, listened to and part of something. We are creating that culture at Arcade.

Customers should feel the benefit

Customers are the most important stakeholder in any commercial organisation, so it is key that our strategy delivers for them too.

They must feel assured that we are the experts and care deeply about getting things right. They must feel valued in the way we communicate and involve them in decisions. They must feel confident their systems will perform as promised for the long term, and they must feel secure that we will deliver safe, compliant and sustainable solutions.

Our long and continued success has been built on trust, care and expertise. These factors create strong, solid and long-standing relationships. We have numerous well-regarded, repeat customers such as Walstead Group and William Gibbons, who have been with us since we started. We have worked with Conamar for around 10 years and are now building a strong, cohesive partnership with emerging customers such as Red Construction.

But our customer service should not stop at the end of a job. We want to set ourselves apart from others in the industry.

That is why the work of our service department is so important to our future. In some parts of construction, the relationship can feel like it ends at practical completion. For us, if we install equipment, we want to help look after it and ensure it performs for the long term. We want our customers to know that we will still be there to complete any small works long after a project has finished.

Extended warranty options with manufacturers such as Daikan, Mitsubishi and Samsung are all included in that aftercare. In some cases, warranties can be extended significantly, giving customers reassurance and giving us the opportunity to stay involved in contributing to the long-term performance of the systems we have delivered.

This is why what our customers experience is so important to our strategy. If it is good for them, it is also good for us. It creates continuity, strengthens relationships and helps us build a more stable business beyond individual projects.

Choosing the right growth

Our strategy focuses the mind on what is right for us. It helps us stay disciplined and question whether an opportunity is worth taking, whether it fits what we are building towards and whether it will strengthen Arcade for the long term.

This approach is important because we want growth that makes the business stronger, not just bigger. That is what responsible growth means to us.

For us, responsible growth means being selective as well as ambitious. It means asking whether we have the right team to deliver the work properly or whether the opportunity supports the kind of values driven business we want to become.

We do not want to chase turnover for the sake of it. We want the right work, delivered by the right people. That is how we protect quality, support our teams and build a business that is resilient enough for the future.

Still Arcade, just stronger

By 2030, we want customers to recognise us as the same Arcade they already trust, but stronger, more consistent and better equipped for the future. We will still be practical, still be agile, still be approachable, still be willing to solve problems and still be committed to getting the job right.

Alongside that, we will be stronger behind the scenes. We will have clearer processes, better governance and services that continue the relationship beyond installation.

We are building a business that our customers can rely on, our partners can believe in, and our people can grow with.

Arcade is building for 2030 and we know where we are heading. Not just bigger, but stronger. Together.