Since Goodfish Ltd was established in August 2010, we have expanded from a 20,000 sq.ft. leasehold building in Cannock (Staffordshire) to 300,000 sq.ft. of mostly freehold buildings (factories, offices & warehousing) in Cannock, Worcester, St Asaph & Flint (N Wales) and Bratislava, Slovakia.
Over the same period, employee numbers have risen from 33 to 145 while annual revenues have risen from £800k to £28m (LTM Oct-25).
Cannock remains the location of the head office of Goodfish Group Ltd, the umbrella company established in 2017 for our operations in the UK & Slovakia. Our head office functions (Finance, Sales & Marketing, HR) and senior management team work across all four UK sites. Goodfish Group Ltd is wholly-owned and controlled by the McDonald Family Investment Company, based in Birmingham.
Our four manufacturing and assembly sites in the UK operate on a stand-alone basis, under the stewardship of Site Leaders who manage the day-to-day activities of each business. All sites use the same finance, HR, production & material resource planning, maintenance, plus quality management & control systems. We are working on establishing, codifying and controlling common standards across all our businesses, so that work, people and ideas are optimised across all four UK sites.
Our full-time, in-house software development team, based in London, create our own bespoke systems, while co-ordinating and improving the transparency, accuracy and visibility of our data across all sites. This enables the senior management team to observe and act quickly when necessary. It also gives our debt & equity providers the insight they need to encourage investment and development where and when it is needed.
Lastly, but really it should be ‘firstly’, our employees, customers and suppliers are the ones who have made all this growth possible. We still have strong relationships with the automotive Tier 1 customers who either stuck with us (Maier) or gave us a chance (Magna) 11-15 years ago. We still operate closely with suppliers who worked with us 15 years ago, holding on through thick and thin as we grew out of instability into sustained growth. This shows in our average tenure statistics, which are:
Employees: 12 years
Customers: 7 years
Suppliers: 8 years
Expansion into Central and Eastern Europe
In 2017, following the UK’s vote to exit the European Union, Goodfish’s strategy changed to mitigate the expected, long-term drawbacks of Brexit. Goodfish Slovakia s.r.o., headquartered in Bratislava, was set up in 2018 as our ‘hedge’ against the future of a UK outside of the EU. Slovakia was chosen, not because labour was cheap, or any such temporary benefit, but because of its central location and established status in the Eurozone.
