DL put up Car & House Prices by around 31%
Lost 550,000 Customers
Hence redundances
My dad said much the same about his old firm, Guardian, when it was taken over by Axa a good number of years ago
Apparently, Axa bought a well-run profitable firm, then applied its harsh cost-cutting measures by cutting many staff and using less qualified ones for underwriting / customer-facing roles, which lead to customers leaving, which Axa supposedly reacted to be cutting even more jobs, just making a bad situation worse.
A similar thing happened when one of my old employers, quite a big engineering consultancy, merged with another and was bought at the same time (early 2000s) by an even bigger US one.
My firm was renowned for quality, treated its staff so well it consistently featured in the top 20-30 of the Times top 100 businesses to work for, plus it was always profitable and never made large scale redundancies, even in the 1970s or early 90s recessionary periods.
A similar set of changes was made to the Guardian / Axa situation, including a change of company name, which decimated its industry / customer reputation, level of profitability and led to many long-serving staff leaving and no longer attracts the best. IMHO, it has never recovered.
Many firms look at first glance to be doing better than years ago because they have higher profits and staff numbers, but often that's because its owners have just grown it by buying up smaller firms (directors 'selling out' in return for big pay-offs and/or cushy positions), mostly for their order books / client lists.
Like with the economy at large, more doesn't mean better, i.e. profitability (like GDP) per person is less than it used to be. Staff retention / turnover, which used to be tiny (same at my dad's old firm) is now terrible.
One of he reasons many of these 'big boys' survive is because (other than getting 'investment' from pension funds, hardly a good return these days) they 'steal' business from smaller (better) competitors because the put in unrealistically low tenders for work which they know their firm cannot provide a decent level of service, but hope that the customer either doesn't complain (much) or doesn't realise they've been ripped off.
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