Taking a business from strength to strength is an achievement worthy of recognition, and for Darren King, Managing Director of Shefford-based fire safety specialist Kings Fire, winning the London Luton Airport High Growth Business category in our recent SME Bedfordshire Business Awards delivered exactly that.
When we caught up with Darren recently, he said: “The awards gave us massive exposure, and they inspire confidence for people to pick the phone up or email and ask for our help.”
We also asked Darren to tell us a little more about his business, the growth it has experienced, and how it has achieved it - and it makes for interesting reading.
Family-owned, transparent, trustworthy
Darren’s recipe for the business’s success isn’t complicated. It’s summed up in the straightforward strapline ‘Quality fire protection’ – which simply means, as he puts it, “doing everything really, really well!”
This isn’t just about extensive technical knowledge across a huge range of specialist fire safety services – from extinguisher servicing to fire risk assessments, and just about everything in between - however.
It’s also about being responsive, getting back to people with transparent information when they require help, and being where they say they’ll be when they say they’ll be there.
“It’s what comes of being a family-owned business,” he says. “As someone who’s worked in this industry for over 30 years, for both larger businesses and family-owned ones, my experience is that the family-owned businesses, in particular, behave in ways that make them trustworthy.”
Going beyond the single sale
The proof of that trust is in how rapidly Kings Fire’s relationship with its customers develops.
“It always starts with an enquiry about something specific – fire training, for instance,” he explains, “but our responsiveness and communication mean the engagement quickly broadens and deepens to involve other services.”
And this can lead to high-profile clients, like Smiths Metals in Bedfordshire, who now use Kings Fire for all their fire training, fire extinguisher maintenance, fire risk assessments, fire door inspections and integrity testing – a huge amount of additional work won due thanks to their excellent work and customer service.
The secret of growth
So, what does this six-year-old business’s growth look like, and what’s behind it?
“We’re growing our customer base all the time,” Darren says, “so we’ve now got, for example, literally thousands of fire extinguishers on our books, and we’ve recently brought on board an additional engineer to address increasing demand.”
“We do relatively little in the way of advertising, but we’ve worked very hard on our website, and we have a strong social media presence, so we’re building a recognised brand.”
But he also cites recommendation and word of mouth as important elements in the growth strategy, fuelled by the company’s passion to “do the work right, and right first time.”
The Award that keeps on giving
"Winning the Award was brilliant!” Darren says. “All of a sudden you're in a room with 350 people and they learn about your services in the blink of an eye.”
But it gets better still, Darren says, because as a Gold winner in this category, the company has been automatically entered into the SME National Business Awards.
“We felt an immense amount of pride in just getting to the final of the Bedfordshire SME Awards, let alone wining one,” he says, “and now we're in the national awards too! The exposure there will be fantastic.”
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