Our principles

Our businesses are run by their own management teams, close to their customers. The Group’s role is to make them stronger than they could be alone: through capital, shared systems, and people who can help.

Management teams run their businesses

Decisions are made where the knowledge is: with the people who know the customers, the products and the market. We don’t run our businesses from the centre.

The Group supports and challenges

We act as an experienced sounding board, offering commercial and financial challenge, practical help when it’s asked for, and an outside view when it’s useful.

We allocate capital carefully

We fund what our businesses need to grow, at a scale they couldn’t command alone, and we judge every investment on the return it earns.

We invest in people

We hire carefully, train and develop our teams, and coach our leaders. Strong businesses come from strong management teams.

We build on good data

Our businesses share a modern systems and data infrastructure, unusual at our size, so decisions rest on evidence and an improvement in one business can be adopted by another.

We think in decades, not deals

We are privately owned, with no exit timetable.

Culture matters

We value ownership, speed, customer focus and a coaching mindset, and we hold ourselves to the same standard we ask of our businesses.