10-year Strategy

The creation of the board has raised our ambitions for the future. Last year we spoke about the opportunity to get to £250m turnover within the next 10 years. This year we are working on a strategy to get to this goal.

More important than getting to £250m turnover is getting to an EBITDA figure of £40m. EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortisation. It is a widely used way of looking at the financial performance of a business.

At the end of this financial year, we expect to make an EBITDA of circa £6.3m on turnover of circa £71m.

We have made the EBITDA target more important because it is more important for us to grow profitability and cash, rather than growing turnover without an increase in profits & cash. “Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality”… as the saying goes.

Our Chairman, Paul Stobart, is facilitating a series of sessions with the SMT to help us devise a strategy to achieve these ambitious future goals. We are aiming to conclude the strategy exercise over the summer, and will ensure that our plan, once finalised, is communicated widely across the business.

Despite our big ambitions for growth, my commitment to maintaining and building upon our “Happy staff”, “Happy customers”, “Happy suppliers” objectives is as strong as ever. The culture at Zen will always be based on putting people first, and money second. I’m committed never to sell Zen to ensure that our culture remains intact.

Achieving our 10-year goal will see Zen make the transition from being the largely unknown name that we are today, to being a major challenger brand.

Exciting times ahead!

Celebrating 20 years at Zen

Tonnia Wilde and Scott Harper were our first two members of staff to complete 20 years of service at Zen. To celebrate, we wanted to go one better than our 10-year celebration, which involves a leisurely lunch at Nutters restaurant just outside Rochdale. We decided to “live it up” with a dining experience in London, starting with a glass of champagne at the top of the Shard!

Pennine Way

About 3 years ago, Beate and I decided to start walking the Pennine Way – mostly doing day walks, but with the occasional overnight stay. The Pennine way runs 430km from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, just over the Scottish border. Most people start at Edale and head north, but for some random reason we decided to do the trail in a southerly direction. So far we’ve done the bottom half of the Pennine Way, from Keld in the Yorkshire Dales to Edale.

During the second week of June we’re going to travel up to Kirk Yetholm and spend a week walking south. By the end of the week, all being well, we’ll only have small gap to close to complete the whole of the Pennine Way. I’m really looking forward to it. Just hope the weather is reasonable!