Digby Jones: The New Troubleshooter (Episode 1)

Lord Digby Jones is a person who is born into business and his mission is to turn survival into success and protect the future of the workforce. In the title of Digby Jones: The new troubleshooter, he will be facing different kind of challenges in 3 different sectors which are the furniture, textiles and electronics company. However, I only managed to watch on of the episode which is episode 1: Hereford furniture.  In this episode, Hereford furniture is a family-owned company with over 40 employees working in this company. Mike Muxworthy is the managing director and his daughter, Kate Muxworthy is the sales and marketing manager in this company. In United Kingdom, Recently, Mike had made a loss of £80k in his business last year and he is searching for advice from Digby Jones. In order to help Hereford furniture to survive, Mike has to take some risk in changing his company policy. By taking high risk, high return is what Mike should do now to turn his company from survive into success. By doing this, he has to make few changes which are very important to him and his company.  

          First, Digby meets the heart of the business which is those employees that work in Hereford furniture. From there, he gets to know that the 40 employees are working at their own job and no one work as a whole together. In my point of view, I could see that there is a lack of communication skills between those workers and it causes the production become inefficient enough. The production inefficiency are mainly because that every workers are only concentrate in doing their own parts and did not participate in other worker’s job. Besides that, Digby doubt that whether Mike is able to handle three divisions in one company. It is good that Mike had that idea of importing products from China, manufacture it and start his own retail shop to sell his furniture to the final customer. By doing this, Mike can import best quality products from China and manufacture it as his own brand name. This might help Mike to create value on his product. However, I disagree with Mike’s decision. Digby thinks that Hereford furniture is just a medium sized company where it is difficult for Mike to be expert in handling all three divisions at all time. Mike’s idea might be good if Hereford furniture is a large sized company such as IKEA. In my point of view, I think Mike is not focus enough if he handles three divisions in a medium sized company and there is not enough of specialist to help him as well. Meanwhile, Mike had also come out with a very large production range in furniture because he hopes that his customer can get whatever they want in Hereford furniture. But this decision is slowly killing his business. From what I have learned in the week 2 lecture class, I think that Mike should divest his assets from negative spread units to release capital for more productive use. In order to create value for the company, Mike can choose to reduce his production range and try to focus in what customer demand in the market. I personally think that a company that has various type of product for customer to choose is a good decision but this does not apply to all company because not all company have the huge capital to cover those losses if those product are not able to sell it out like Hereford furniture.

Other than that, I realized that the designs of furniture from Hereford furniture are too simple and boring which is also mentioned by Digby Jones. In this case, Digby bring Mike to Emma Bridgewater which is a very famous company in United Kingdom just to prove that whether the brand name of Hereford by Design is attractive enough to attracts the customers in the market. However, the brand name is not strong enough to get customer’s attraction and so Kate and her shareholder come out with a new brand name that called “Hygge”. This word does not exist in the dictionary because it is a Danish word where they think that it could attracts customer’s attention. In my point of view, people will always have the curiosity about things that they never seen or heard before. Therefore, I believe a brand name like “Hygge” is attractive enough to get customer’s attention where it is also a kind of strategy to create value for the company. Moreover, Digby wants Mike to prepare a cash flow forecast to support the product range reduction which Mike could not see any benefit of doing it. In this case, I personally think that preparing a cash flow statement and balance sheet in every end of the month is very important to a company because we can know how much profit we earned and what is problem that causes a company making a loss.

In conclusion, I was impressed by Digby Jones of how he changes the fortune of a medium sized company like “Hereford furniture and the way that he solves the problems and talk to everyone in a smart and polite way. In five months’ time, he could manage to help Mike to make some changes in the future of the business. Mike had also understood that in order to save his company, he will have to take a big step forward and to change his style and everything. I believe that Hereford furniture will have a bright future if Mike could overcome those problems that are pointed out by Digby Jones. As what Digby Jones said, “Failure is always not an option”.