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Applying AI Successfully to Increase Value and Accelerate Business Improvement

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:18:47 GMT

ValueStep’s Co-Founding Directors, Robert Osborne and James Leng examine how their hard-won sector experience combined with stewardship of emerging AI capability can combine to drive real improvement in owner-managed businesses — those that have outgrown their foundational stage but face challenge to genuinely securing their full potential. ValueStep typically works alongside businesses with revenues from £5 million and beyond. The application of AI as an accelerant to our lived executive, business and project leadership experience is a powerful tool — notably aiding our clients in their business decision-making, while helping them stay confident of not losing, in the noise, what made them worth building in the first place.

1. The Reality on the Ground

Most owner-managed businesses that have outgrown their foundational stage but haven't yet reached the scale of a corporate — typically with revenues from £5milion — run by the person or people who conceived them from nothing — who know their market, their customers, and their craft better than any consultant who might walk through the door. That's the starting point. We respect it — because we've done it for ourselves.

But in a trading environment that has never been more uncertain, knowing your market and knowing how to accelerate the value of the business you've built are two different things. Most owner-managers feel they alone must carry both. But they also carry everything else — the payroll, the key accounts, the difficult conversations, the operational firefighting that fills the gap where strategy should be. There's never enough time. There's rarely enough resource. And the business, despite performing, is in practical terms constrained.

That gap — between where the business is and what it could be — is where ValueStep operates.

We're not economists. We've built, fixed, led, and exited businesses. We know what a real Monday morning feels like when the cash position is tight and the order book looks thin. Our model is operator-led advisory — we've sat in the seat.

AI doesn't change the fundamentals but applied astutely it shifts what is now possible in the criticality of time available.

Two books published recently have sharpened our thinking behind this approach. Sam Stacey’s ‘Brunel’s Bees’ explores how intelligence emerges from coordinated systems rather than individual brilliance — and why fragmented organisations consistently underperform their own potential. Peter Allen’s ‘The Conscious Organisation’ examines how leaders navigate transformational change without losing the values and identity that made their organisation worth building. Both have sharpened how we think about the challenge ahead — how to stay opportunistic without ever losing control.

Defence: Short arms, deep pockets – where are the contracts?

2. Why AI Matters — and Why Most Businesses Are Getting It Wrong

The noise around AI is extraordinary. Every software vendor, every LinkedIn thought leader, every management consultancy is telling you to move fast, automate everything, and transform your business before your competitors do. Some of that is genuine insight. Most of it is sales.

The honest position is simpler. AI — properly applied — compresses time and deepens qualitative information processing capacities. It accelerates data processing, surfaces patterns that would take weeks to identify manually, automates routine tasks, and reduces the cognitive load on leadership teams who are already stretched. Used well, it gives owner-managers back time they didn't know they were losing.

Used badly, it creates dependency, false confidence, and decisions driven by algorithmic output that no one in the business properly understands. Remember the old phrase – Garbage In, Garbage out.

"The question is never whether to adopt AI. It's whether you're in control of how you do it."

The privately-owned business sector has exposure to this risk. Without the governance structures of a large corporate, without a dedicated IT or transformation function, without the bandwidth to assess and implement technology carefully, the default position is either wholesale uncritical adoption or paralysis. Neither serves the business.

What the sector needs is what it's always needed: highly experienced people with genuine, hands-on sector understanding who can cut through the noise, apply judgement, and help owners make decisions that build long-term value rather than create short-term distraction.

The EV assault: what the automotive disruption actually means in a toolroom

3. The ValueStep Model — Four Stages

We apply a four-stage framework to our business transformation work. AI now runs through each stage as an accelerant — not as the answer, but as a tool we direct to make our human judgement more powerful and the output more precise.

Stage One — Honest Diagnosis

UNDERSTANDING WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING

We never arrive with a pre-packaged model or a standard assessment template. We arrive as practitioners. We have the kind of conversations that get to the truth quickly — with owners, directors, functional leads, and in some cases customers and suppliers — and we build a picture of where the business actually is rather than where the management pack hope or says it is.

This matters more than it sounds. In most privately-owned businesses, the gap between perception and reality isn't dishonesty — it's cognitive overload. The leadership team is carrying too much. They're too close to the day-to-day to see the patterns. They know something's wrong, but they can't quite name it.

AI tools now allow us to process and cross-reference multiple data inputs — financial performance, customer behaviour, margin analysis, staff turnover, operational throughput — in hours rather than weeks. We can build a diagnostic picture that is both rigorous and fast. The sophistication is in what we look for. The speed is what AI provides. The quality is in how we assess the output from that processing.

The output is not a 200-page report. It's a clear, evidence-based view of where value is being lost and where the largest opportunities for improvement lie. Actionable. Prioritised. Real and Honest.

Stage Two — Conscious Decisions About AI Adoption

CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE RIGHT REASONS

Before any business embeds AI capability, the leadership team needs to make conscious decisions about what that means for their organisation. This is not a technology conversation. It's a leadership conversation.

AI is a cognitive force. It doesn't just automate tasks — it changes how roles are defined, how decisions are made, and how knowledge is held within the business. Deployed without that understanding, it erodes exactly the things that make a privately-owned business valuable: the deep institutional knowledge, the customer relationships, the operational instinct that sits in the heads of experienced people.

Deployed well, it amplifies all those things.

Peter Allen’s The Conscious Organisation puts this with clarity: organisations that survive and thrive through transformational change do so because their leaders remain deliberate stewards of purpose — not passive recipients of whatever the technology demands. The question is never simply what AI can do. It’s what you want your business to be, and whether the way you adopt AI serves that or undermines it.

We work with leadership teams to consider a structured approach to AI adoption — what we call the AI Archetypes framework. It's designed for non-technical leaders who need to make governance decisions without becoming technologists themselves. It maps the roles AI might take on — from automating routine back-office tasks through to influencing commercial decisions — and helps owners assess where automation adds genuine value and where human judgement must remain in the seat.

"In an AI-enabled market, operational capability becomes a commodity. What cannot be replicated is the soul of the business — the values, the relationships, the leadership character that customers actually trust."

Owners who embed AI in service of their business purpose, rather than in place of it, will be the ones who build durable enterprise value. Those who adopt AI reactively, because everyone else appears to be doing it, will find themselves with a technology bill and a business they no longer fully recognise.

Stage Three — Mining the Knowledge You Already Have

TURNING INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY INTO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Every privately-owned business that's been operating for more than five years holds a remarkable asset — and almost none of them know it. That asset is their accumulated operational intelligence. Customer data. Margin history. Pricing decisions and their outcomes. Supplier performance. Staff performance patterns. Operational improvement initiatives and what happened to them.

It sits in spreadsheets, email threads, management accounts, customer files, and the heads of people who've been with the business for years. It's fragmented, largely inaccessible, and never systematically used.

AI changes that. It can search, connect, and surface patterns from data sets that would take months to manually review. Done in hours. Done at the scale of the whole business history rather than the most recent quarter.

Sam Stacey’s Brunel’s Bees offers a powerful frame for why this all matters. The hive’s intelligence is not the product of any individual bee — it emerges from the system’s ability to retain memory, coordinate decisions, and adapt collectively. Most privately-owned businesses have never had that system. Knowledge walks out when people leave. Decisions made ten years ago, and their outcomes are lost and unrecoverable. The institutional memory that should be compounding instead dissipates. AI, properly applied, finally gives the hive its memory back.

But it has no judgement. It cannot tell a commercially sensitive insight from a routine one. It cannot weight what matters in the context of where the business is trying to go. It cannot distinguish between a pattern that represents a structural problem and one that's a one-off anomaly. That requires deep sector expertise — people who have run businesses in the sector, who understand the commercial dynamics, who know what good looks like.

The ValueStep model pairs that real life practised expertise with AI capability. The expert defines what matters. AI does the heavy lifting. Together, the output is contextualised, actionable intelligence that the owner-manager can use — not a data report that ends up on a shelf.

Stage Four — Implementation That Builds Capability

TRANSLATING INSIGHT INTO LASTING ENTERPRISE VALUE

Diagnosis and insight without implementation is expensive thinking. The final stage is where the work becomes real.

We translate AI-assisted diagnosis into costed, sequenced change programmes — with clear governance, defined accountability, and realistic timelines that reflect the fact that the business still must function during transformation. We don't detach the business from its operations while we strengthen it. We work alongside the team.

Critically, we build the client's capability rather than their dependency. Our goal is not to create a relationship in which the business needs us indefinitely. It's to leave the owner-manager and their leadership team with the tools, the understanding, and the governance frameworks to run their AI capability themselves — to be intelligent clients of the technology rather than passive consumers of it. We add value, build trust, and deliver results. The work that follows tends to follow from that.

The end state is a business that has embedded AI responsibly into how it operates, with human oversight at every decision point that matters. The ambition is enterprise value improvement that is structural and sustainable — not a technology project that ages out in three years.

4. What This Means for Enterprise Value

Enterprise value in the privately-owned business sector is driven by a relatively small number of factors: revenue quality and trajectory, margin performance, management team depth, operational resilience, and customer concentration risk. Sophisticated buyers — whether trade acquirers or private equity — look at all of these. They pay multiples for businesses that perform well across all of them. They discount heavily for businesses that don't.

AI — properly applied — can have a direct and measurable impact on most of these factors.

Revenue quality improves when AI surfaces pricing opportunities and customer attrition signals that the management team can act on. Margin performance improves when AI identifies operational inefficiencies at a granularity that manual review cannot reach. Management team depth improves when AI tools handle the cognitive load that currently sits on two or three senior individuals, freeing them to lead rather than administer.

Operational resilience improves when knowledge is captured and systematised rather than concentrated in individuals who might leave.

These are not marginal improvements. In businesses of this scale, a 10–15% improvement in EBITDA driven by operational efficiency and revenue quality can translate into a material increase in exit value — the kind that changes what an owner takes home at the end of a transaction.

"The businesses that will command the strongest multiples in the next five years will be those that have embedded AI capability responsibly — and can demonstrate it to a buyer."

That's not a speculative claim. It's already visible in how sophisticated acquirers are assessing targets. The due diligence question is no longer just 'what's the EBITDA?' — it's 'what systems do you have, and are they scalable?' AI capability, properly evidenced, is becoming a value driver.

5. The Cost of Getting It Wrong

The failure mode is real. Businesses that adopt AI uncritically — that hand decision-making over to algorithms they don't understand, that automate processes without retaining the institutional knowledge that made those processes work, that invest in technology platforms that don't integrate with how the business actually operates — create a different problem than the one they were trying to solve.

We've seen it in businesses that implemented AI-driven demand forecasting without understanding the seasonal and relationship-driven nuances of their customer base. The algorithm was technically correct. The commercial decisions it generated were wrong. And the people who used to carry that judgement had been automated out.

We've seen it in businesses that digitised their customer data without a governance framework, then found themselves unable to use it coherently when a key commercial decision depended on it. And in businesses that outsourced marketing, social media, even phone enquiry handling to ‘bots’ — stripping out the human touch that was a genuine advantage and draw before.

The pattern is consistent: technology without expertise, speed without judgement, adoption without ownership. Failure is rarely one of bad faith or incompetence — it’s cognitive overload. Too many interacting decisions, not enough capacity to integrate them, knowledge dissipating rather than accumulating. AI, in the wrong hands, compounds that. In the right hands, it resolves it.

6. Why Now

The window is open, but it won't stay open indefinitely. The businesses that move in the next 12-24 months — that make conscious, expert-led decisions about how to embed AI capability — will establish a structural advantage over competitors who move reactively or not at all.

The tools are maturing, extremely quickly. The costs are falling. The sector expertise required to apply them intelligently exists. What's been missing, in most cases, is the bridge between operator-level business knowledge and AI capability — a bridge that most technology vendors don't provide because they're not operators, and most traditional advisers don't provide because they're not technologists.

That's the gap ValueStep occupies. Operator-led. Sector-experienced. AI-capable. We've built and exited businesses. We've led corporate turnarounds. We've managed enterprise value improvement programmes across manufacturing, construction, engineering, and professional services. We bring that experience to bear directly — and now we use AI to make it faster, more rigorous, and more precise.

How We Engage

The conversation starts with an honest diagnostic. No pre-packaged answer. No standard template. A direct conversation about where your business is and where it could be.

ValueStep operates differently from traditional consulting. Our engagements are typically structured either as ‘fractional executive’ retained services — where we work alongside the leadership team on an ongoing basis — or on a performance-adjusted basis tied to successful outcomes. In both cases, we put our own skin in the game. We align ourselves with the business directly because our reputation is the result.

Manufacturing in the Crossfire

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:31:50 GMT

UK SME Manufacturers: Navigating an Unprecedented Convergence of Risk

I have spent the last six years embedded deep inside a UK manufacturing business. Not advising from a distance but leading from the inside: active on the shop floor in Redditch, looking over the in-house toolroom, talking to customers whose supply chains are under pressure, and trying to make the numbers work in an increasingly uncertain global landscape – a volatile environment that gives you very little margin for error.

So when people ask me how UK SME manufacturing is doing, I don’t reach for an academic tome. I look at our horizon of life – the real-time sales order book.

At Pre-Met, we are genuinely building momentum – precision metal pressings and stampings for aerospace, automotive, construction, transport, medtech, and, increasingly, defence. Over the last five years we have invested in new technology, taken on new people, made acquisitions, and entered new markets.

There is real change in parts of the sector. But the headwinds are the most severe I have seen in thirty-five years, and the perfect storm of wars and conflicts, a global cost of living crisis, accelerating technology change, and political uncertainty in every direction are all hammering any remaining opportunity to balance the books – let alone achieve sustainable profit. That is what makes this moment genuinely different.

What follows is my honest read of four forces bearing down on UK SME manufacturers right now:

1) the latest twists to the steel tariff and import regime that are making UK manufacturers less competitive than their EU and Asian counterparts;

2) the delay to the UK Defence Investment Plan and what it is actually doing to companies in the defence supply chain;

3) the Chinese and Far East EV offensive and what it means for UK and EU automotive component suppliers; and

4) the Government’s budget-busting employer National Insurance and National Minimum Wage changes that have added a structural cost to every manufacturer with a workforce. None of these is a new story. Together they form a picture that demands a clear-eyed response.

Steel: a game of tariff roulette we didn’t choose to play

The UK exported around 300,000 tonnes of steel to the US in 2017, worth roughly £490 million. By 2023 that had fallen to 165,000 tonnes and £388 million, battered by Section 232 tariffs that started in 2018 and have escalated sharply since. In June 2025 the US raised those tariffs to 50% for almost all trading partners.

The UK was held at 25% under the Economic Prosperity Deal – a relative reprieve, not a resolution. On 2 April 2026 the rules changed again: tariffs now apply to the full customs value of steel, not just its metal content, and only steel ‘melted and poured’ in the UK qualifies for the preferential rate.

That is the export side. Here is the side that gets less attention and matters more to most UK manufacturers.

From 1 July 2026, the UK government is cutting steel import quotas by 60% and imposing a 50% tariff on any imports above those limits. The intention – to protect British Steel and domestic producers from cheap, state-subsidised steel diverted by US and EU protectionism – is right. The consequence for downstream manufacturers, the businesses that buy steel as a raw material, is a serious competitive disadvantage that the announcement barely acknowledges.

A UK metal pressings manufacturer buying above-quota steel from 1 July faces a 50% tariff on that input. Their German or French counterpart buys from EU producers within the single market without that cost. Their Asian competitors produce their own subsidised steel at prices that bear no relation to a market rate.

The UK manufacturer is caught between a policy designed to protect one part of the steel industry and a market reality that makes their finished goods more expensive to produce than the competition. That is not theoretical. It lands directly in the quote you are preparing for a customer who is also being quoted by suppliers in Germany, Poland, and South Korea.

UK steel demand has contracted 16% since 2018 while import quotas have been liberalised by 22% oversized and ineffective simultaneously. Global excess capacity is heading toward 721 million tonnes by 2027, more than a hundred times UK annual production. You cannot forward-contract steel with the same confidence you could three years ago.

You cannot price a fixed-cost contract twelve months out with certainty about your material costs. Protecting producers at the expense of processors is not a steel strategy. It is a choice about who bears the cost – and right now, that choice is landing on manufacturers who are already under pressure from every other direction.

Defence: Short arms, deep pockets – where are the contracts?

In June 2025, Pre-Met obtained JOSCAR approval – the global best practice supplier portal used by thousands of major OEMs, tier-one suppliers, and supply chain companies across the UK and Europe. We qualified for the UK MoD Procurement portal registration too. We passed every criterion and compliance check.

We went to the Farnborough JOSCAR ‘meet the buyer’ session. Defence spending is heading toward 3.5% of GDP by 2035, and the government has committed to increasing direct MoD spending with SMEs by £2.5 billion by 2028. We have done the work. We are ready.

And then we wait.

The UK Defence Investment Plan – the ten-year framework that was supposed to tell industry where the money is going and when – was promised in autumn 2025. It did not arrive. It was still unpublished at year end. As of April 2026 the Ministry of Defence is still, in its own words, ‘working flat out’ to finalise it. In testimony to the defence select committee in March 2026, trade body executives were direct: SMEs across the defence supply chain are ‘bleeding cash’.

Some have had to exit the sector. Others are surviving only because major prime contractors are bailing out their supply chains. MoD payments outstanding in the supply chain are compounding the problem. The ambition is not wrong. What is wrong is the gap between the announcement and the contract, in which real businesses run out of cash, real workers lose jobs, and real capability – the kind that takes years to build – disappears from the UK industrial base.

The House of Commons defence committee said it plainly: industry ‘lacks an adequate signal’ from government.

I said it at the Made in the Midlands Westminster Parliamentary Reception in December 2025 and I will say it again: UK manufacturing is full of exceptional people and businesses who want to do this work. The capability exists. What has been missing is the will to give industry the certainty it needs to invest ahead of the contracts.

You cannot build a sovereign defence supply chain by announcing it. You build it by issuing contracts to companies that can deliver, and you issue those contracts when those companies still exist. The SME Commercial Pathway launched in January 2026 is a step, but it is not a complete package yet.

The EV assault: what the automotive disruption actually means in a toolroom

In 2025, BYD outsold Tesla in the UK: 51,422 vehicles to 45,513 – the first major Western market where a Chinese manufacturer outsold Musk’s company. In September 2025 alone, BYD’s UK sales surged 880% year on year. Chinese brands now account for roughly 10% of all new UK car registrations. This is not a trend that is coming. It has arrived.

Every major established European manufacturer outside Toyota saw production volumes plateau or decline in 2025. UK vehicle production fell 15.5% across the year. Volkswagen, Stellantis, Ford – the names that have been sending purchase orders to UK component suppliers for forty years – are running lower volumes, building more of what they do make in lower-cost regions, and managing the transition to electrification with all the financial strain that implies.

The market is not disappearing. It is migrating toward players who largely do not have established UK supply chains.

For Pre-Met, which has supplied into automotive for decades, this is not a remote threat. The ICE component that was a reliable long-run order five years ago has a shorter and less certain future today. The EV supply chain is being built differently: faster, with a higher proportion of components manufactured in China and brought into assembly in Europe.

BYD’s Hungary plant is designed to produce 800,000 units annually, and their stated intention is to build a complete local supply chain for European production. That supply chain is not currently UK-first.

The answer is not panic and it is not protectionism. The answer is what we have been doing: diversify into sectors where UK supply chain resilience is valued and the quality bar is high enough to matter. Aerospace. Rail. Defence. Medtech. These are sectors where JOSCAR approval, AS9100, TS16949 accreditation, and 100% on-time-in-full delivery count for something.

The manufacturers that will come through this are the ones that moved decisively into adjacent sectors before their automotive customers told them the order was ending.

UK National Insurance and the National Living Wage: a structural cost with no mitigation

From April 2025, employer National Insurance rose from 13.8% to 15%, and the secondary threshold dropped from £9,100 to £5,000 per year. You pay more. You pay it on more of each employee’s earnings. The OBR estimated the combined cost at approximately £25 billion a year. That is not a one-off. It is a permanent structural increase in the cost of employment.

The British Chambers of Commerce found 82% of firms say the NI rise will impact their business. For manufacturers – labour-intensive by definition, unable to move their workforce offshore or replace a press setter with an algorithm – the impact is not theoretical. At Pre-Met, every additional employee, every apprentice, every skilled machinist we retain costs more than twelve months ago. Not because their wages have risen.

Because the tax on employing them has gone up and kicked in at a lower threshold. For Pre-Met specifically, this is an annual cost shift of £60–70k – the equivalent of two or three full-time operators – for no operational gain whatsoever.

Then there is the National Minimum Wage, rising on top of everything else. This is not an argument against paying people properly. It is an observation about the stacking. In a single twelve-month period, UK manufacturers absorbed higher NI, a higher National Minimum Wage, extremely elevated energy costs, tariff-driven material price uncertainty, the ongoing fallout from post-Covid debt, and the ripple effects of Ukraine and Iran.

Alone, each is difficult to navigate. Combined, we face scaling Everest in sliders and beach shorts.

The 940,000 employers seeing higher contributions are not large corporations with treasury teams and flexible global cost structures. They are metal pressings in Redditch, toolmakers in Coventry, precision engineers in the West Midlands – the industrial backbone of the regions the government says it wants to level up.

Telling them to absorb the cost or pass it on to customers, when customers are also under pressure and looking for lower prices, is a policy answer that does not survive contact with a real balance sheet.

So what do we do?

I am not writing this to complain. Complaining is not a strategy, and I have spent enough time in distressed businesses to know that the companies which survive difficult periods are not the ones who wait for the environment to improve. They are the ones who face the truth of their position, act on it, and use the difficulty as a forcing function to do the things they should have done anyway.

The strategic response for any SME manufacturer is this: diversify your customer base before you have to. Qualify into sectors that value UK supply chain resilience. Invest in technology and accreditation when you can still afford to, not when your existing revenue is already falling.

Review your steel procurement now – before 1 July, not after. Understand your quota exposure, your transitional arrangements, and your above-quota cost on every input line. Manage your cost base with discipline. Face the truth of your balance sheet before HMRC forces the conversation.

At Pre-Met we have been doing this. The QSP acquisition in May 2025 brought wire form and spring manufacturing expertise, robotic welding capability, and access to new markets in transport, electronics, and construction. The £500,000 invested in consolidating QSP delivered a 30% boost in production capacity. JOSCAR approval opened the defence door.

Rail is now a growth market, with production expected to rise another 20% in 2026. None of this happened by accident. But it is what active management looks like when the external environment is against you.

That is the manufacturer’s answer. The honest answer to ‘what do we do’ cannot stop there, though. Government has to play its part. The UK cannot build a world-class SME manufacturing base on warm words, delayed investment plans, and a tax regime that penalises the act of employing skilled people.

So here, directly, is what I would ask of government – five measures that would make a material difference, most of them already standard tools in the countries we are competing against.

1. Refundable Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit

Full Expensing already exists, but it only offsets tax liability – and it arrives too late for a business investing ahead of profit. A refundable credit at 25p in the pound on qualifying manufacturing capex – CNC, presses, robots, tooling – means HMRC pays you the credit even with no current tax liability, putting working capital back into the business at the point of maximum cash pressure.

The US did this through the IRA. France does it through the JEI scheme. For Pre-Met’s £500k QSP consolidation, a 25p refundable credit would have returned £125k at exactly the moment we needed it most. Manufacturing capital investment deserves the same treatment as research.

2. Employer NI Exemption for Manufacturing Apprentices and Accredited Skilled Workers

The NI hike is a structural tax on employing people in a sector that cannot offshore its workforce. Target the relief precisely: exempt employer NI on apprentices in manufacturing for their first three years, and on workers employed by companies holding recognised manufacturing accreditations

- AS9100, TS16949, JOSCAR, ISO 9001. This rewards exactly the behaviours government says it wants

- skills investment, quality accreditation, supply chain resilience – and gives businesses a financial incentive to keep training rather than freeze headcount.

3. Export Processing Relief on Steel Inputs

A proper Inward Processing Relief scheme: if you import steel above the new quota, add value through UK manufacturing, and export the finished product, you reclaim the tariff paid on the steel input. This is standard across Germany, France, the US, and South Korea.

Restore it properly for UK exporters and the two policy objectives – protecting domestic steel producers and supporting manufacturers who process steel – are no longer mutually exclusive. Right now, the policy treats them as if they are.

4. Defence SME Advance Payment Guarantee and Fast-Track Certification Fund

Two measures, neither requiring the DIP to be published first. One: mandate 30-day payment terms across all MoD supply chain tiers with automatic late payment penalties ringfenced into a Defence SME liquidity fund. Two: fund JOSCAR, AS9100, and DASA certification costs for qualifying SMEs up to £50k via a grant administered through existing trade bodies.

British Business Bank to back a pre-contract facility so SMEs can fund the investment a defence contract requires before that contract is signed. This keeps the supply chain alive while the DIP catches up.

5. British Business Bank Manufacturing Export Guarantee

For a 60-person business in Redditch with a £400k export order into aerospace or rail, the transaction cost of accessing UKEF is often prohibitive and the minimum deal sizes exclude them entirely. A BBB Manufacturing Export Guarantee for SME manufacturers with verifiable accreditations: loan guarantees covering pre-export working capital and buyer credit guarantees making UK manufacturers price-competitive against German and French competitors who have state-backed export finance as standard. Cap it at £5 million per transaction.

Embed access inside existing trade bodies – Made in the Midlands, Aerospace Wales, Northern Powerhouse Manufacturing – to remove the friction. We are competing against businesses whose governments are quietly backing their working capital. We are not.

None of these are new ideas. They are standard tools in the countries we compete against. The ask from UK SME manufacturers is not special treatment. It is a level playing field with competitors we are already up against – and a government that recognises the difference between protecting the companies that make steel and protecting the companies that make things with it.

The challenges are not going away quickly. The tariff regime will remain unpredictable, with a step-change for steel buyers on 1 July. The DIP will eventually arrive, but contracts reaching SME shop floors will take time. Chinese EV brands are not retreating. The NI and wage costs are permanent.

The response is not to wait for better times. It is to position for them while they are still approaching – and to hold government to its stated ambition for the sector while doing so.

That is what ValueStep does. That is what Pre-Met does. And it is what every well-run SME manufacturer should be doing right now: taking the honest look, making the hard calls, and getting on with it.

James Leng

Executive Director, ValueStep Limited | Managing Director, Pre-Met Named in Britain’s Great 100, December 2025

j.p.leng@valuestep.co.uk | +353 (0) 87 460 5484 | www.valuestep.co.uk www.metalpressingsandstampings.co.uk

Key Takeaways

UK SME manufacturing is under sustained pressure from multiple external forces acting simultaneously
Policy timing gaps are creating real commercial risk for otherwise viable businesses
Global competition is accelerating faster than domestic response
Businesses that act early on diversification and cost discipline are best positioned to survive and grow

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the biggest challenges facing UK SME manufacturers in 2026?
UK SME manufacturers are dealing with rising input costs, labour cost increases, global competition, and policy uncertainty occurring at the same time.

How are steel tariffs impacting UK manufacturers?
Steel tariffs increase raw material costs and reduce competitiveness compared to EU and Asian suppliers operating under different cost structures.

Why does the delay to the UK Defence Investment Plan matter?
The delay creates a gap between capability and contracts, putting cash flow pressure on SMEs that have already invested to supply the defence sector.

What impact are Chinese EV manufacturers having on the UK market?
They are accelerating the shift in automotive supply chains, reducing demand for traditional components and changing where production value sits.

How can UK SME manufacturers respond to these challenges?
By diversifying into resilient sectors, investing in capability early, managing cost structures tightly, and acting before market pressure forces change.

Leadership Recognition in UK Manufacturing: James Leng Named in Britain’s Great 100

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:28:47 GMT

At a Glance

James Leng recognised in Britain’s Great 100 for leadership in UK manufacturing
Recognition linked to fractional leadership role at Pre-Met
Focus areas: strategy, resilience, workforce development, and supply chain strength
Contribution to long-term growth, capability expansion, and sector impact
Award highlights leadership influence across British industry

Overview

We are pleased to share that James Leng, Co-Founding Director of ValueStep, has been recognised in one of his client-facing fractional leadership roles as one of Britain’s Great 100 — a national honour celebrating leaders shaping the future of UK manufacturing and engineering.

Jason Pitt, CEO of Made in the Midlands (left), with James Leng, Managing Director of Pre-Met (right), at the Great 100 celebration in London.

Jason Pitt, CEO of Made in the Midlands (left), with James Leng, Managing Director o f Pre-Met (right), at the Great 100 celebration in London.

Why James Leng Was Selected

James’ recognition reflects his consistent commitment to advancing UK manufacturing through:

Championing British industry in national forums, trade associations, and parliamentary events
Driving sustainable, future-proof practices across operations and supply chain
Investing in talent, including apprenticeships, technical training, and workforce development
Demonstrating resilience and strategic thinking through Pre-Met’s 2025 programme of investment, capability expansion, and sector accreditations
Strengthening UK supply-chain reliability across defence, aerospace, and transportation markets

His leadership has been instrumental in positioning Pre-Met for long-term growth, capability enhancement, and increased national impact.

James Leng listed among the Round 9 honourees at Britain’s Great 100 Awards.

Leadership Perspective

James Leng at Made in the Midlands reception with Edward Howard, Carringtons.

Discussing the wider importance of the Great 100, James noted:

“Being named among Britain’s Great 100 is a tremendous honour. UK manufacturing is full of exceptional people and businesses, and I’m proud to play a part in driving the sector forward. This recognition reflects the dedication of the entire Pre-Met team and our shared commitment to backing British innovation, skills and industrial strength.”

James Leng listed among the Round 9 honourees at Britain’s Great 100 Awards.

Industry Recognition

In support of the achievement, Pre-Met added:

“We are delighted to see James named among Britain’s Great 100. His leadership has played a key role in driving Pre-Met’s growth, investment strategy, and commitment to high-quality UK manufacturing. This recognition highlights the impact of his work across the sector and reinforces our shared commitment to strengthening British industry for the future.”

James joins the 2025 cohort of Britain’s Great 100 winners, recognised for their contribution to UK manufacturing.

James Leng at Made in the Midlands reception with Edward Howard, Carringtons

About Britain’s Great 100

The Great 100 celebrates individuals advancing British industry — including innovators, mentors, sustainability leaders, and supply-chain specialists.

Honourees were recognised at a London event following the Made in Group’s Westminster Parliamentary Reception, where manufacturers, policymakers, and industry partners discussed the future of UK engineering and industrial capability.

As part of this recognition, James is included in the official Great 100 leadership cohort and may use the Great 100 mark across professional communications and public channels.

James joins the 2025 cohort of Britain’s Great 100 winners, photographed here with industry leaders recognised for their contribution to UK manufacturing.

AEO

What is Britain’s Great 100?
Britain’s Great 100 is a national recognition programme celebrating leaders who are shaping the future of UK manufacturing and industry.

Why was James Leng recognised?
James Leng was recognised for his leadership in UK manufacturing, including strategic growth, workforce development, supply chain strength, and long-term industry impact.

Author

ValueStep

ValueStep is a strategic advisory team of senior business leaders with experience across turnaround, restructuring, growth, and enterprise value creation. The team works directly with boards, founders, and leadership teams in private and public sectors to deliver measurable outcomes in complex, high-stakes environments.

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Applying AI Successfully to Increase Value and Accelerate Business Improvement

1. The Reality on the Ground

Defence: Short arms, deep pockets – where are the contracts?

2. Why AI Matters — and Why Most Businesses Are Getting It Wrong

The EV assault: what the automotive disruption actually means in a toolroom

3. The ValueStep Model — Four Stages

UNDERSTANDING WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING

CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE RIGHT REASONS

TURNING INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY INTO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

TRANSLATING INSIGHT INTO LASTING ENTERPRISE VALUE

4. What This Means for Enterprise Value

5. The Cost of Getting It Wrong

6. Why Now

How We Engage

Manufacturing in the Crossfire

UK SME Manufacturers: Navigating an Unprecedented Convergence of Risk

Steel: a game of tariff roulette we didn’t choose to play

Defence: Short arms, deep pockets – where are the contracts?

The EV assault: what the automotive disruption actually means in a toolroom

UK National Insurance and the National Living Wage: a structural cost with no mitigation

So what do we do? ﻿

1. Refundable Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit

2. Employer NI Exemption for Manufacturing Apprentices and Accredited Skilled Workers

3. Export Processing Relief on Steel Inputs

4. Defence SME Advance Payment Guarantee and Fast-Track Certification Fund

5. British Business Bank Manufacturing Export Guarantee

Key Takeaways

Frequently Asked Questions

Leadership Recognition in UK Manufacturing: James Leng Named in Britain’s Great 100

At a Glance

Overview

Why James Leng Was Selected

Leadership Perspective

Industry Recognition

About Britain’s Great 100

AEO

Author

So what do we do?