29/11/10
Brian Lakin, founder of Sigma 3 tells Sunday Times how he made it
How I made it: Brian Lakin, founder of Sigma 3
Taken from the Sunday Times, 28 November 2010
After 20 years’ graft, this entrepreneur’s kitchen-making business went up in flames; now the company has risen from the ashes and has 11 showrooms
Two of Brian Lakin's sons have joined him in the £17m turnover business Brian Lakin was relaxing at home one Friday evening when one of his staff called to say his factory was on fire.
It was a heart-stopping moment. The factory represented 20 years of building his kitchen-making business, Sigma 3, from scratch.
“When I was about half a mile away I could see the flames,” Lakin said. “We had a warehouse full of stock.”
The blaze in 1995 destroyed the factory, but Sigma 3 survived. Today it turns over £17m a year and has 165 staff.
Lakin, who was born and brought up with his older sister in Barry, on the South Wales coast, had a love of making things from his early years. His father, an office manager, taught him how to use tools and make wooden toys.
From the age of 12 he made forts and other toys for his cousins and friends. “I was left-handed so my father used to criticise me for being a bit ham-fisted, but I seemed to get by in the end.”
Lakin left school at 16 after dropping out of A-levels and got a job with a firm of cabinet makers. In his spare time he made furniture for friends and family in his parents’ shed.
“I made headboards for beds, bedside cabinets, telephone cupboards, anything,” he said. After a year with the cabinet maker he left to work on a building site as a carpenter. In 1975, at the age of 18, he started a cabinet-making business of his own with £1,000 of savings.
Lakin used some of the money to buy an old Nissen hut, originally from an RAF base, which he erected on land at his uncle’s farm to use as a workshop. A couple of weeks after establishing the business, a friend came to work for him and together they made everything from kitchen cabinets to bedroom furniture.
The business went so well that after 18 months Lakin spent £11,000 on a workshop in Barry with a showroom attached, helped by a loan from his father and his grandmother. He called his firm Sigma 3 because at the time he was producing three ranges of kitchens and the symbol for the Greek letter sigma and the number 3, when written with straight sides, were mirror images of each other.
The business thrived, helped by Lakin’s belief in the quality of what he was making. “My confidence came from my mother,” he said. “Her advice when I left school was that if I learnt to use my hands I would never be out of work, and that has proved to be good advice.”
It was not all plain sailing. In 1977, a defective batch of glue plunged the firm into difficulty. Lakin had used the glue to stick laminate onto wood for kitchen cabinets. Six months after the kitchens had been installed, the laminate started to peel off. He had to replace five kitchens and Sigma 3 shouldered the cost.
“We had to take our time to get it done because we simply couldn’t afford do it all at once,” he said.
That same year, he decided to specialise in kitchens because he could see it was a growing market. It proved to be a good decision and over the next few years he opened a showroom in Swansea and moved to a factory in Cardiff.
Then came the fire that almost destroyed everything. It was caused by an electrical fault in a part of the building that was let out. The factory smouldered for eight days. Lakin rented a property across the road and subcontracted work to other firms. Fortunately, none of the customers cancelled their orders even though some had to wait months for delivery.
It took a year for the business to recover but it has gone from strength to strength, expanding into fitted bedrooms and offices. There are 11 showrooms in South Wales, Lancashire, Surrey and Sussex and a manufacturing base in Llantrisant, Mid Glamorgan.
Lakin, now 54, has been joined in the business by two of his four children, Richard and Edward. He said he has a simple formula for business success: “Apply common sense. If I don’t understand something, I try not to get too involved in it.”
He has this advice for other entrepreneurs: “Try to ensure you have the full support of your close family. Running a business inevitably crosses boundaries and has an impact on your domestic life, and there are times when you can’t be around. If you haven’t got support at home, that is going to make things a struggle.
“I have always found time for the really important things in life — family and friends — but it is a difficult balance sometimes. For many years the longest holiday we had as a family was a week. Sometimes it would be only a week in a year.”
