How do you successfully bring manufacturing back to the UK when the sole source of sound equipment has been produced abroad for decades? How do you survive a lockdown when speakers are what you make for a living? These are just some of the many adversities Andrew Bishop has faced and conquered in his life. I’m excited to have had the opportunity to speak with Andrew, founder and CEO over at BishopSound – a proudly local-based manufacturer of reliable, affordable speakers for both public and private performance. According to Andrew, British sound is unique and can’t be found anywhere else in the world. He said NO to waiting for international shipments. Andrew is trailblazing the industry by getting everything done at home in the UK, reimagining the future of local manufacturing once and for all.

To say Andrew has some fascinating stories to share would be an understatement. From building his first speaker cabinet in 1972 at age 12 to receiving phone calls from clients in tears at the sound his speakers unleash – you don’t want to miss out on Andrew’s story of bringing his production back to the UK. Hit the button below to watch this awe-inspiring podcast right now.

How did you come about manufacturing speakers?

I made my first speaker when I was twelve. So I’ve been around sound for a long time. I had to go off and get a proper job for a few years to pay the mortgage. But I was brought back into sound when I purchased Carlsbro Sound for a pound. It was advertised in the Sunday Times, and I was the only one that answered the advert!

A good friend of mine said to me in 1999, Andrew, you need to be in British manufacturing. At that point in time, I said, you must be crazy! There was a mass migration to the Far East, and so for my friend to say to me, you should be in British manufacturing, everybody laughed and said no it’s finished, it’s the end. But I bit the bullet on New Year’s Eve in an office in Leeds I slid a pound coin across the table, and I was the proud owner of Carlsbro. It made the first PA system back in 1959 and did the sound for the Rolling Stones in 1963 with a 100 watt PA system.

Where there a lot of issues in the business that needed turning around?

It was losing 560,000 on a 960,000-pound annual turnover. So it was haemorrhaging cash like no tomorrow, which tested my skills in finance. But I really felt there was a passion from the workers. I remember going to the factory and saying, what do you do? And they said we make the best PA speakers and amplification in the world. They were on £3 an hour and it was fathers, sons, daughters, aunties, uncles, passionately making speakers and PA systems. So it’s got a tremendous heritage and a tremendous story.

So what is the British sound? What’s unique about it? And why is it highly sought after around the globe?

My feeling is this. The American sound is all top and bottom. There’s no mid-range. So, a lot of people with the American sound, like the thumping bass and the very high frequencies, but there’s not a lot going on in the middle. This makes some music sound a little strange. So if you play Hotel California, where there’s all those acoustic guitars on the front, you can’t pick them all out individually because the frequency at which an acoustic guitar works is in that mid-range frequency. Some people struggle to get a voice to sound, right because there’s no mid-range.

The German sound is exceptionally clinical. It’s very sharp, precise. There’s no warmth, it’s very edgy. And the Chinese sound, because I believe they’ve been brought up with the Pentatonic scale and Beijing opera, they love the high frequencies and base for them doesn’t seem to register.

The British sound is an exceptionally warm sound. I describe it as Grandma’s Gravy because it’s got richness. It’s got body, it’s got warmth, it’s got meaning, and it covers all the frequencies. So I think there’s no surprise that British Hi-Fi does very well globally as well. It’s because when our engineers do the sound, there’s nothing missing.

Tell us a bit about what BishopSound do now.

So I lost Carlsbro in 2008. when that credit crunch hit. We’d already moved everything out to the Far East, but when China got wind of the fact that there was a run on the banks in the UK, they basically said, that’s it we’re not dealing with you anymore. We’re not even giving you any facilities.

So, I then had to put Carlsbro into receivership, because I couldn’t find anybody to invest in the business. Then five or six years later a Nigerian customer rang me and said, Andrew, we want your sound back. We can’t get your sound. Make some speakers, put the name BishopSound on the front and we’ll give you an order for a 40-foot-high cube container. I said, no I’m not going to get back into all of that again. And he replied, you must because the sound that you create is the sound that we want for our churches in Africa.

So I started making speakers again, but this time differently. I stayed with China for the manufacture because the UK was in bits as far as manufacturing PA equipment and sound equipment. There were very few people left doing it. But I always wanted to come back and make speakers in the UK because I believe that’s the way to do it.

Bringing production back to the UK.

We got a small industrial unit in Ripon, next door to a mechanical engineer. His friend is a woodworking guy from the Southeast, who’d moved to Ripon. One of his passions was to make a CNC machine. So they knocked on my door and said, can we make some speakers for you, Mr Bishop? So they built a purpose-built CNC machine, which on the 25th September 2021 was commissioned by our local MP and we will be making purpose-made speakers in Ripon for the PA companies.

Now, as far as skills are concerned, electronics will be deployed in the programming of the CNC machine. We’ve been offered the use of an anechoic chamber in Derby University to test the speakers once they’re made. So we’ve been around the block a few times. We know what we’re aiming for and the sound we want. And we will be back making bespoke speakers in the United Kingdom for export globally

I recently had an enquiry for 206 speakers for Doah, and they needed them in four weeks’ time. We can do that. We can make pretty much any speaker, in any colour in the time that anybody wants. We’ve got control. We’re not waiting for shipments from the Far East, we’re not subject to minimum quantities. So for us, it’s the future and it restores our passion.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in running globally successful businesses?

The biggest challenge is getting paid, so we never give credit. There are all kinds of people that will offer you solutions. Credit insurance is a great thing. But those credit insurance companies don’t pay out very quickly, and if you’re in manufacturing, cash is king. We have no bad debt in this business.

The second challenge is reaching out to the world. The great thing about the English language is that a lot of people speak it. In business, it’s not about sitting in a chair and doing everything from the screen. It’s about getting out there and being in the room with people to get their confidence. We’re very privileged we deal with probably about 180 countries on and off. When we go, we take a little bit of Yorkshire tea or some honey, and we just say, this is a taste of the United Kingdom, here’s what we’re about.

Are there any tools or techniques specifically that you think have helped you get to the position where you are today?

To get us through the last 18 months, we worked very closely with Innovate UK and Harrogate Borough Council with their raft of advisors and specialists. We go to people and if they haven’t got the answer, we ask if they know anyone who can help us.

So our business model is quite simple. We don’t employ anybody, we use freelances for everything that we do. We need to be talking to our customers and focusing on our strengths, so we use outside advisers and get other people to make the things and do all the other bits behind the scenes.

What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you who want to find out more about what you doing?

I make my mobile number freely available everywhere and if I can’t help someone, I will give them a phone number for somebody that can. And I think that treating others as you expect to be treated yourself and getting directly to the owner of the company shouldn’t be difficult. If you want to be in business and you want to go global, make yourself accessible and make yourself available to everybody.

Contact Andrew here.

I spoke to Manoli Yannaghas, who is the CEO and co-founder of VoltVision, to find out more about what sustainability in manufacturing means, and how we can use data to reduce our corporate carbon footprints.

Manoli, who has more than two decades of industry-specific experience, shares some of his company’s goals for the future, his thoughts on reaching net-zero, and some actionable tips on how to cut costs you didn’t even know you were spending. He explains how to cut up to 20% of operations, how to overcome challenges as a start-up and more.

Check out the video to hear what he has to say!

How you got involved in electrical power systems?

I spent 20 years working in the mining industry, running small mining companies or operations around the world. And about five years ago, I decided the ongoing problem of mining is it’s either unstable power or very expensive power. So, my partner and I Malcolm Evans, who’s the co-founder with me on VoltVision decided that renewables were a very interesting way to help mines stabilise their power and reduce the power costs and their CO2. So, initially, our business was around how to transfer a traditional power system onto a renewable power system.

What are the goals of VoltVision and how do you see it growing?

Most of the businesses that we work with are high voltage which is a lot more complicated than low voltage. So we are interested in providing intelligence to asset owners. We started with the mining business and help our clients better understand how they’re using the machinery in their production plants. We do that by recording very high-resolution data from existing electrical equipment that would otherwise be lost. It’s all there, but it’s just not being extracted. I think a lot of people out there are running around installing lots of sensors here, there and everywhere. But if you look at it closely, you don’t have to do that. Plus, on high voltage, you can’t do that because people won’t let you into their substations to mess around with their equipment.

The big generators, the transportation network and the very large manufacturing companies cars would be high voltage. We’re interested in providing intelligence to these clients, explaining to them how they can reduce their power costs. Take motors for example. Electrical motor systems take up half of the electricity used globally and 70% of that is used in the manufacturing community. So it’s a big deal. We study motors to help them reduce their power, reduce their CO2 and increase sustainability. And that’s really around life, so we can better help them use those pieces of equipment in a way that that machine will last longer using, for instance, an advanced fault identification to spot when a machine is being overused. We’re about using data to provide intelligence to industrial, or in our case, mining clients.

Do you think there are opportunities within power usage that people aren’t aware of?

Yes, 100%. There are so many opportunities around motors and around power systems. The electrical equipment that is being produced now is more intelligent than has ever been. There are many computers, much of what’s sitting on the electrical networks, and they’re collecting lots and lots of data. So for the first time, you can actually see what’s going on, and why a system isn’t running very well.

I think with open-mindedness there’s the ability to cut 20% of most existing operations that are not being monitored. The people building a manufacturing plant will oversize because they don’t want anyone coming back at them. So quite often you’ve got a lot of oversized kit and you don’t know when a conveyor belt is running. Maybe it shouldn’t be running because there’s nothing on it. So there are multiple angles to easily reduce CO2 emissions by knowing what you’re doing and having someone shine the light into the dark room.

Do you have an example of how a customer has reduced their energy usage?

I’ll use the example of one mine who actually didn’t use our system because it wasn’t ready. But, they went to one of the largest mines in South Africa, and said, okay, let’s do an audit of exactly how much power we’re using here and where it’s all going. It took them a year and they changed out 40% of their motors and saved themselves over 20% in power. This is what we do on a continuous basis. Most big companies get an audit twice a year on the performance of their motors on retrospective data. But, you can do more than that now. You can see when you start overfeeding a motor and you can bring it back in line very easily. It doesn’t require any Capex to do that.

What are the key things that work when turning a failing business around?

Firstly you have to be willing to be present. If you’re away from something, and this is one of the tricky parts of small mines, you’ve got to be there on-site. It’s really about changing culture, changing people. One of the hardest things to do is to go into an existing business and effectively saying, I’m afraid it’s not working, you’re not working and you need something new here. Being really robust about that can create an awful lot of short term problems. It’s emotionally quite difficult.

Secondly, something we had to do was to take a very badly designed manufacturing plant over the line. In the end, the investment just wasn’t there to change what needed to be changed. A lot of smaller companies just try and stick it together with sellotape and rubber bands. This will work in the very short term but not in the long term, and they spend a fortune trying to plug the holes.

We’re doing some work with a client at the moment who are doing a ground-up, brand new plant. It’s a hydrogen electrolyser down in South Africa. They’re changing their entire truck fleet from diesel over to hydrogen battery hybrids. What’s nice about this project is that because it’s brand new, we get to have a say in some of the equipment needed in order to make it really good. It’s also really nice to see a big company design something from the bottom up, because they know what they’re doing and they do it really well. They’ve got the budget.

What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

My email address, which is manoli@voltvision.live. That’s probably the best way, or just go to our website, www.voltvision.live there’s a link through where you can get in touch with me there.