£5m contract win reveals inspirational story behind Gloucestershire firm
Aged just 25 and suddenly saddled with a very modest family firm Kane Lewis thought about walking away, but instead set off on a journey of personal discovery that's created a £multi-million business.
Dear readers,
We hope you had a great weekend.
Welcome to Monday’s edition of The Raikes Journal. In case you missed Friday’s edition, we took a look at the story of a Cheltenham cyber firm that has just been taken over by an American fund.
It’s a success story, but we wanted to know what it says about Gloucestershire’s cyber sector and the potential for other firms quietly growing here in what is billed as the cyber capital of the UK.
We were lucky enough to get some insight from Chris Dunning-Walton of CyNam that proved very interesting indeed about how ambitious the influential cyber group really is for the county. You can read that here.
Unlike our Friday editions, which are generally ‘members only’ as we seek to make what we do sustainable (that means the stories are part hidden behind paywalls) Monday’s are always free.
And so today everyone can read our main story that takes a look at the personal journey one young Gloucestershire businessman is on that is intrinsically tied to his relationship with his business, a company he has taken from a modest £200,000 turnover to several million pounds. And there is more to come too!
We hope you find it as fascinating and inspirational as we did. If so, please do share it and encourage more people to sign up and join our growing army of readers.
Regular readers will notice the lead story also features one of our Founding Partners, the firms that laid down the money to make The Raikes Journal possible to start with.
That business, QuoLux, has a habit of getting name-dropped when we’re writing about the county’s fastest growing firms. It always puts a smile our our face when that happens!
We confess it here in case you thought it was a plant. Raikes does not do advertorials!
Have a great week,
Andrew Merrell (editor).
NB: Raikes publishes probably the best-read business-related email ‘newsletter’, pound for pound, in Gloucestershire.
If you have a story, an issue, a news item, a charity or an interview you want us to write about or investigate, challenge the powers that be on, then please email me: andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
Charity that helps Cotswold’s homeless honoured with King’s Award
Today we draw your attention to another Gloucestershire charity, Cirencester Signpost. You don’t have to take our word for it being brilliant; it’s just won The King’s Award for Voluntary Services. The awards recognise outstanding examples of volunteering in the UK and are the highest award given to local voluntary groups. Graham Harris, Cirencester Signpost founder, said: “Our aim is to get lives back on track by putting a support plan in place, working towards anyone homeless having a place to call home, maintaining a tenancy, gaining training and employment and embracing a life of dignity and self-worth. It’s a team effort.” You can find out more here.
Your briefing notes...
🚜💵 A consortium led by the University of Gloucestershire has won £2.5 million in funding to help explain how land use can support our national commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Running over three years, the project will be led by the university’s Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI). To achieve the Net Zero target will require large-scale changes in the way land is used. This includes changes to farm businesses. The CCRI will collaborate with Cranfield University, Harper Adams University, University of Aberdeen and Scotland’s Rural College, three major greenhouse gas accounting companies – AgreCalc, Farm-Carbon-Toolkit and the Cool Farm Alliance – and Savills natural capital team.
🥕🍹🥖🍯 Tomorrow (19 November) will see round two in the series of events staged by Food for Thought take place. The community interest company supports Gloucestershire’s food, drink, farming, and hospitality sectors to ‘thrive, not just survive’. Its series brings together experts on the sector with suppliers and producers. Tomorrow’s event will see Professor David Hughes take a look at the global food and drink industry trends and offer “valuable insight” for businesses. Due to take place from 10am on Tuesday 19 November at Clavell & Hind, Elmstone, Hardwicke. Find out more here.
🏆 A Gloucestershire family business has walked away a winner in a regional awards staged by online magazine Business Desk. Lanes Health, the manufacturer of medicines, food supplements, natural products and confectionery, based in Barnwood, Gloucester, was crowned winner in the family firm category of the South West Business of the Year Awards. According to the Business Desk the awards were created to celebrate the very best business successes from across the region. The awards, by headline partners Michelmores and Partners&, also raised money in support of addiction rehabilitation centre Broadway Lodge.
🏆🏆🏆 As we spelled out with one of our lead stories last week, Thursday evening marks the return of the Believe in Gloucester Awards (you can read that story here). The event will showcase some of the very best companies, businesses, organisations, charities and individuals who help make the city – that’s wider Gloucester, not just its centre – so special. The Raikes Journal is proud to be media partner for the event, will be there on the night and be running a full report on Thursday too. Watch this space.
📚💵 Gloucestershire County Council has revealed that its work to establish a new school at The Eastbrook Centre has amounted to £1.3 million investment. The Altus School is specially for children and young people who have struggled in mainstream settings and have been, or are at risk of being, permanently excluded. The council spent the money buying and refurbishing the centre, which was previously used as an independent school. It can now accommodate 48 year 10 and 11 pupils and help them complete GCSEs, vocational qualifications, or to return to a mainstream school.
💵On Friday 22 November there will be a very special charity event - the Wonderland Charity Ball in support of charity Hope for Tomorrow at Manor by the Lake, Cheltenham. The gala dinner will also feature a special auction. The details of the lots are on the charity’s website, but include the star prize of four nights for two people in Matera, Southern Italy. Find out more here.
* Everything you read on The Raikes Journal is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
If you upgrade to paid you’ll be part of this community interest company too. In an era when local journalism is all but gone and websites covered in pop-ups and full of advertorials, lists and unedited press releases, we are dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire, to championing the county, in particular its businesses, charities, education and training providers and to helping create an even stronger community. If you upgrade to paid you will be able to see past the paywalls on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire, the series that follows the financial fortunes of our biggest firms by turnover. You will be able to comment on our stories too. You’ll be helping make this CIC sustainable. Please do join us.
If you sign up now you can take advantage of our 30 per cent off offer - and become a member for a year for just £84, which works out at £7 a month or £1.62 a week! Or go all in and become one of our Founding Partners or Founding Members, and overpay!
£5m contract win reveals inspirational story behind Gloucestershire firm
Aged just 25 and suddenly saddled with a very modest family firm, Kane Lewis thought about walking away, but instead set off on a journey of personal discovery that's created a multi-million pound business.
By Andrew Merrell.
A new regional office in Exeter for a Gloucestershire security firm may not sound too exciting, but read on and you will learn how that business went from a modest £200,000 turnover to a multi-million pound concern and about the inspirational story of its owner.
That owner, Kane Lewis, delayed university to work for the family ‘locksmithing and building security’ firm and got so used to earning money he never left – but that was a very different time, a very different business and a very different Kane Lewis.
Back then Severnside Security was a much simpler company turning over a modest £200,000 – that was until his father upped and left one day, leaving his son with a choice - to fold and walk away or learn how to play, and learn quickly.
He stayed, and today Lewis is steering a fire and security system solutions business for residential and commercial customers that clocked a turnover of £3.68 million in August 2023, £5.1 million this year and has just won a public sector contract worth £5 million to kick off its 2025/26 financial year.
Turnover for this year is forecast to be in the region of £7 million.
If word is true, at least one potential buyer has already made an offer, but it seems clear that Lewis isn’t interested. He isn’t finished. And at just 32, who is?
He’s already won recognition and awards, but it was the new regional office in Exeter driven by Severnside’s recent expansion into Devon and Cornwall that made The Raikes Journal want to take a closer look at just what is really going on.
Composed, modest, politely spoken and straight talking, Lewis does not put on any airs and graces when we meet at his Gloucester offices on Meteor Court, Barnwood, and he talks about the business and himself as very much a work in progress.
It emerges he is also one of the already significant and growing number of businesspeople that have used county experts QuoLux to develop their leadership skills and its Good Dividends model can be seen in DNA of Severnside Security.
That’s the model that argues businesses which are forces for good also grow faster and deliver better financial results.
“When we speak to potential clients we emphasise what we will do to boost the local economy. We will use local contractors, create jobs and recruit locally. We are very conscious of our impact.
“In Exeter we estimated we’re already adding £100,000 annually into the local economy,” said Lewis.
He describes the Exeter base is a “strategic hub”, a move to streamline Severnside Security’s parts and hardware distribution for contracts across the deep West of England. It’ a move that has created nine jobs already and is set to grow by 50 per cent in 2025.
Total staff numbers company-wide are now estimated at 60.
When we meet, Lewis has just returned from a few days volunteering with other businesspeople on a project in South Africa for the Footprints charity founded by Gloucestershire business legend Bob Holt. Still more personal development.
(That trip was organised by Luke Drew and Zac Cosgrove of a plumbing, heating, mechanical services and building maintenance company Cosgrove & Drew Ltd).
“For me personally it was about opening my eyes a bit more. You can get caught up in your own life and work.
“This is one of the first times in a long time I have been away from work. It puts everything into context,” said Lewis, clearly moved by the experience and keen to embed more of that kind of charitable work into the company.
His father, Tony, and business partner Roger founded the business that led to Severnside Security back in 1992.
“They did nothing with it really. It was just locksmithing and building security. In 2013 my dad went on his own and asked me to come on board with him, which I did,” he said.
Then in 2017/18 his father, facing a number of personal issues, “just vanished”.
Aside from the impact this had on Lewis’s mother, his sister and himself, it left him with another headache.
“It left me with a business I did not really want. It would have been easier for me to close it down.
“I did not see it as an opportunity. But I took a long look at it and decided to try and rebuild it. That was 2018”
Lewis was just 25/26 years old.
We needn’t go into the details on the family side here, needless to say that a driving force in him was to do right by his remaining family and to step up for them.
“I didn’t have anyone to ask for help at the time. I was embarrassed as well,” he said, when I asked if he could turn to anyone for advice on the business.
A year later and the world changed again, and so did his view of the business too.
“Probably about 2019, going through Covid-19, I began to think ‘I could do something here’. That was the reflection piece.
“Before Covid we were focusing on high-net worth clients. We were project driven and we were working with some big names, but covid made us think what else we could do and that was when we pivoted.”
In case I think he’s making it sound easy he adds: “I have made mistakes along the way. I hired some people because I thought ‘they are the sort of people I would get on with’.
“What I should have done is hired the opposite of me. I’ve lost some good employees too.
“But I was able to work that out, and I now have some incredible people working here. We recruit people who are technically savvy, but what we really look for is people who want to come along for the journey who understand what we are trying to do.”
That ‘pivot’ during the pandemic was more of a giant change of course and attitude to what the business was capable of.
“We thought ‘stuff it’ we will go for the major contracts,” he said.
These are contracts that today see the company work with the likes of Mears and Mitie, two of the biggest housing maintenance and outsourcing firms in the UK.
It was this expansion that saw the business move into the deep West of England too and led to the recent investment in Exeter.
Those early days of carrying the world on his shoulders have gone. Today he’s supported by a growing number of contacts, gained not least from the QuoLux leadership development programme he pursued.
He undertook its flagship 10-month leadership and business development programme, LEAD™, specially for CEOs, managing directors, directors and senior managers.
These are some of the people he now turns to if he needs, as he says, to ‘sense check’ any decisions.
It’s a way of thinking which may seem normal to those of you reading this – asking your peers in similar roles for advice - but older readers may recall a time when asking for advice was seen as an admission of weakness.
The Exeter move is the firm’s third regional UK office.
“The office has been designed as a strategic hub to support Devon and Cornwall and to better service our most prominent client contracts in the region.
“Currently, these contracts account for 15 per cent of our national turnover, but this strategic hub will enable acceleration to 25 per cent of our national turnover, aligned to the business’s growth plans as well,” said Lewis
Severnside’s client base now covers multiple sectors, including the public sector encompassing housing associations, local authority contracts, and schools, as well as retail, hospitality, commercial, private business and private residential.
Expansion is also taking place in the South East too.
“What’s clear is that the demand for our services shows no signs of slowing down as we celebrate a number of significant contract wins,” he said.
“We are looking forward to what lies ahead and are dedicated to protecting businesses and communities throughout the region with exceptional service and knowledge.”
 | A guest post by
|