Alex Turner meets Stuart Canvas chief executive ED STODDART

AS A 20-year-old, Ed Stoddart had a very clear ambition.

“I wanted my own business by 30 – I failed by two years,” he said. “Then I wanted to be the director of a FTSE 100 company, but no longer.

“My current ambition is to grow this business with a view to sell it and be happy. Ambitions change.”

Not that the 37-year-old chief executive of Stuart Canvas is in any rush to move on from the Warrington business he bought as part of a consortium in 2006.

“It was everything we – me and my wife – wanted to do,” he said. “We were looking for an exit out of London and I wanted an opportunity to have my own business to make a success of.

“We looked at lots of different markets, although I didn’t think I would end up in manufacturing.

“I love what we do here, I think it is fantastic. We have developed a lot in the last four years and there’s a lot in the pipeline.”

He has firm thoughts on how that pipeline will translate to the bottom line, looking to quadruple the business in the next five years, taking the business to double-digit turnover.

Stuart Canvas creates products for three areas: sport, transport and bespoke. Its transport division produces curtains, nettings and roll on roll off sheets, mainly for smaller operators who have up to 300 trucks, while its bespoke products are in demand from BAe Systems to domestic leisure use.

But it is sport, which accounts for more than half of the company’s sales, which Stoddart expects strong growth to come from.

The company’s board has a strong sporting pedigree. The chairman is Compton Hellyer, founder of Sporting Index, alongside directors Nick Pocock, former captain of Hampshire County Cricket Club, and Peter Bickmore, who is in horse bloodstock.

Stoddart’s career has also been mostly in sport, after an initial foray into banking. He went into golf, working for Clubhaus looking after its membership before spending two years at a 63-apartment, 18-hole golf course in Valencia, Spain, in a sales and marketing role.

Coming back to the UK, Stoddart worked for the Air Transport Association, luxury travel firm Abercrombie and Kent before going freelance as a sales and marketing for golf courses in the south of England.

His varied sports and leisure career then took in a stint at Namco Station, on London’s South Bank, which he helped to change from a place with arcade games into a corporate entertainment venue.

Having “achieved what I wanted to achieve” there, he went back into sport, looking after Folkestone and Lingfield racecourses for Arena Leisure.

It was there he became aware of the opportunity at Stuart Canvas in 2005, and the deal was completed the following April.

“I thought it was a great opportunity,” he said. “I saw great scope to push it forward.”

Stoddart added: “I am not the most studious person, but I love being in business – and I like to spot opportunities and with those opportunities we have to take calculated risks.

“It’s more about common sense. That’s the approach I take here and how my staff deal with people.

“We try to run this business from a common sense point of view. It goes back to the point of service.

“People like to be dealt with in a polite and efficient manner. Put that in with good product and good marketing, it’s a good mix.”

Stoddart is particularly enthusiastic about a product being tested in time for the forthcoming cricket season.

“We have developed a product that you throw up in 45 minutes and you can net inside. Will the cricketers like it? In 2011, we will see.

“We are willing to put our money where our mouth is. We think it’s going to work, we are doing a demo day in February.

“Within our business there is a lot of risk, putting a new product out. We have to be ahead of the game and be the first one to do it.”

Cricket is also boosting the company’s exports, helped by the World Cup, which starts next month.

“We are doing a lot of export at the moment. The Cricket World Cup is in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and we have just supplied to four grounds over there.

“I am going over to Bangladesh in two weeks to put a hover cover in there.

“Our export market is growing quite substantially. That’s another growth area that we have. It’s really happened in the last 18 months.

“However, in cricket, there’s a limited market in the world for certain products. Our key product, the hover cover, how many people can afford it and want it? A good driver for growth is export but we still see the UK as our main market.”

Stuart Canvas is also targeting a swift approach to growth – acquisition. The market is quite fragmented and the recession has put some firms under pressure which increases the opportunities – and decreases the cost – for takeovers.

“Last year was 50% growth, which was natural,” he said. “But we are also looking for acquisitions that are tactful, where we can use our data to sell more products to the same people.

“It’s going to be quite an important strategy over the next two to three years, but we will also see natural growth through our products.

“We are looking for acquisitions in the sporting arena, although a lot of our competition are one, two or three-man bands and that wouldn’t really be an acquisition.

“In the sports sector, there’s reasonable competition in certain areas. We view it as healthy competition, but if you can help yourself by acquiring one or two of your competitors it can be helpful, especially in the cricket market.”

At the end of last year, Stoddart did exactly that, taking over JMS Cricket, a Yorkshire-based manufacturer of mobile covers as well as sightscreens, mobile cricket nets, pitch protectors, slip catching cradles, artificial wickets and field equipment.

He added: “JMS Cricket is a great strategic fit for the business, and allows us to capture and serve even more of the cricket market.

“Both companies have good reputations in the cricket world and will continue to provide complementary and yet quite different offers to customers.

“It was a very good opportunity to take on a competitor and take on some products we didn’t have the knowledge of.”

Expansion is at the forefront of Stoddart’s mind, having recently moved into larger premises.

Stuart Canvas might have only travelled 200 metres down the road, staying on the same Woolston park, in the shadow of the M6, but, in taking on a 25,000 sq ft unit after outgrowing its former home, it has laid the physical foundations for the company’s projected future growth.

Stoddart said: “Now we have got the space, we can be more productive and carry more product.

“We really like to get production lines running. We can do one-offs but we, like anyone, like to do thousands.

“In the old place, our capacity was tight and our lead times were longer, so from that point it was important to come across.

“It was a fantastic move for us.”