The boss of a North Staffordshire window manufacturer has vowed to 'protect all the jobs I can' as the company slowly starts to return to work this week.
Listers, in Stoke-on-Trent, closed for business on March 23 following the Government's lockdown announcement - with 140 of its 145-strong workforce put on furlough leave.
But from today, around 10 per cent of staff will return to the Fenton-based business as part of wider plans to get the firm operating at a 70 per cent capacity by July.
Listers' CEO Roy Frost – who acquired the company in August 2017 – said: "The journey we’ve been on as a business over the last two years has been transformational. It’s been a big turnaround job, we have got new customers from outside the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire area, which was always my aim; we’ve got a great quality product and our processes are great.
“We got everything going and then this happened and our market disappeared overnight.”
Roy added: “We ceased operating as soon as the Prime Minister made the announcement that all non-essential businesses need to close, and to be honest we were expecting it.
“The week before the lockdown I was terribly worried about people coming to work so we put a number of measures in place, including having people work from home, social distancing and hand sanitiser stations, but we couldn’t get things like face masks and shields. We furloughed around 140 of our 145 employees at Listers.”
New measures are being introduced at Listers as part of the phased re-opening.
Most Read
Roy said: “We will be opening our trade counter for click and collect orders and have put new measures in place including a two-metre queuing system, appointment-only collection and non-contact delivery. We are also practicing social distancing and have PPE.
“We will see what happens on May 7 and if some of the restrictions are lifted we can bring more colleagues back from May 11.
"The fundamental thing for us is that a lot of our products need to be fitted inside people’s homes, so it has been a bit worry for us about what we, and the wider market, is going to do next. When we come out of this, there’s going to be a very new type of ‘normal’ and none of us know yet what the demand is going to be like and what volumes we will be doing. We’ve got to test the water and slowly bring more and more colleagues back into the business. I want to protect all the jobs I can.”
Roy added: “We have got to keep our business going and everyone employed and I’m hoping we will see some kind of lifting of restrictions soon so our customers can start work again. While it’s hard to predict, I would hope that Listers could be operating at 70 per cent capacity by July; companies like Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon have started back and we need to make the windows for their new-build construction schemes.
“That would be sustainable for us but our industry is one that is driven by consumer confidence so we will just have to wait and see, but we are quite good at managing a crisis.”