1. Please provide a company background including when it was established, where it is located, how many staff you employ etc.

 

Richfield Industrial creates video and stills for SMEs looking to expand their sales at home and internationally. We integrate these with website design, exhibitions and brochures.

 

Richfield Industrial was established in 1975 to provide companies with specialist Industrial photography and rapidly expanded into creating brochures and exhibitions, integrating the skills of copywriting with design and photography and working for some of the major UK businesses of the time including GKN, BP, GEC Marconi, the London Metal Exchange and Cookson.

 

In 1995 we were approached to provide industrial video for a client who had been with us for 10 years and wanted to promote a new product in the aluminium foundry business. We travelled around the UK and to the USA and that first video was a great success, helping to build our client’s business across the world. We learnt the true value of video testimonials. A good testimonial is always helpful but a video testimonial/Case Study, is extraordinarily so. People are far more willing to believe a real professional praising a product or service when they see and hear it. That’s how humans are wired up - they like to see it with their own eyes.

 

2.  Please provide an overview of the products and services offered and areas of specialisation. 

 

Now we work entirely electronically and supply video and stills which are generally used online, on laptops or at exhibitions. The great thing about having a good series of videos when you’re presenting is that they hold the audience’s attention for that precious few minutes and set the scene for your own words. A good video ‘primes’ the viewer to appreciate and warm to your proposals.

 

So our clients send us around the world and the UK getting their customers to say how good they are and then use those Testimonials to win more business and open up markets. We also prepare company videos that sum up the USP and capabilities of our clients. Two of our clients have won Queens Awards for Industry in the last 18 months.

 

Having specialised in industry for such a long time our clients have great trust in us, so they stay with us for decades - and that allows us to gain enough insight into the company’s direction and management to work completely unsupervised as an extension of their marketing and sales operations. As an example, recently a client rang up to say that he had an important presentation and could we create him a 4 minute video outlining the state of the aluminium industry worldwide? We had about 2 days to do it. So we scripted and researched, dug into our archives and produced it in time for a quick rehearsal before his Powerpoint presentation. The Powerpoint failed to work but the video set the scene so effectively that his verbal outline was far more effective and punchy, and carried the day.

 

Parallel to our video and design service we decided in 2008 to create a new mounting system for putting small waterproof and shockproof cameras on adventure equipment like windsurfers, racing cars, mountain bikes, microlites and quads. It’s called the Flymount  www.flymount.com  and we sell it in 24 countries - all the Europeans, USA, South America, Australia and the Far East. 

 

3.How did you find out about emita and what benefits do you find the most valuable?

 

EMITA originally gave us some advice and then gave us time with a retail specialist whose advise was pertinent, in-depth and very valuable. Following this we launched Flymount on to the world and suddenly had to cope with materials and manufacturing, transport and import duties, Customs bureaucracy and dealing with the sales and marketing of a physical product. EMITA was again helpful in getting us time with specialists to educate us in many aspects of the export business. 

  

4.What made you decide to expand your business overseas?

 

With the recession we needed to export - and found that exporting is not nearly so intimidating as it might appear, and a very constructive way to be in business. The UK is amazingly proficient and has the finest engineers in the world. Exporting and filming in other countries opened our eyes to the way the rest of the world views our products - and it’s a very positive view. British design and engineering is everywhere, and trusted. The other benefit of having had an Empire is that engineers throughout the world speak English as their ‘lingua franca’ so they can communicate with their counterparts in other countries. In fact, one chief engineer told me not to translate into his language as he found it easier to understand in the kind of ‘Engineering English’ they all use - plus he knew we’d not faked it!

 

As the business grows it’s given us another and deeper insight into our clients’ export business activities and found, to our benefit, that the tools we gave them would also work for us. It’s a virtuous circle, the more we learn the more valuable we are to our clients in industry. 

 

5.What’s the most helpful piece of international trade advice you have received?

 

If I was asked what single piece of advice was most valuable in our decision to export I have to say it’s the simplest -’just do it!’. You can procrastinate forever, but once you are committed the world opens up and rewards you. As they say, fortune favours the bold. 

 

6.What does the future hold? Any particular markets you are looking to target next?

 

For us the future lies in two directions. We will increase our partnership with companies, mostly SMEs, who are looking to export and need our kind of support to overcome sales resistance and the competition. Secondly, we are developing the Flymount brand and have a new and exciting product which we are hoping will take the world by storm - and it will be conceived, designed and manufactured in the UK.

 

With a bit of luck EMITA will be there to support us and get us to the right expert advice when (and often before) we need it.