Rebecca Hatch, Managing Director of INDO Lighting

What has your career path been to become the MD at INDO Lighting?

I actually started on my career path as an Engineering Technician and progressed through the ranks over a few years to Principle Engineer, always remaining within the lighting industry.

I thought that the technical route was the right path until I went on a two-day management and leadership course with my employer at the time and quickly realised that I had far more interest in business and management than I did with the technical aspects.

I didn’t want to leave the lighting industry, so I started to look for ways to progress while remaining in lighting, which I love.

I moved into business development firstly, which I managed to do while maintaining my engineering credentials.

This enabled me to keep within my customer base and enabled me to join INDO Lighting when a sales role came up, with the idea of progressing to the Commercial Director position.

While I was Commercial Director, I undertook an MBA to give me an in-depth understanding and theory behind what I was doing on a day-to-day basis. It allowed me to develop those skills and the more natural instincts I had towards business.

As an engineer, was it tough being a woman in a male-dominated environment?

In most situations, courses, meetings, I was the only woman.

The lighting industry is a small part of the engineering community; for context, there’s roughly 2,000 lighting engineers in the UK and about 80,000 civil engineers.

To make that even more niche, my focus has always been street lighting, which is towards the very engineering end of lighting.

When I first joined the industry, I wasn’t just female, but a young female, working with predominately men in quite an ageing industry.

It was hard at times and I must admit when I took the job, I didn’t fully know what I was going into.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I took the opportunity thinking if it didn’t work out, I could go to university a year later. I stayed with that employer for five years, and 15 years later I’m still in lighting!

Has your engineering background helped you move into the commercial side of things? 

Most definitely.

Although we do work with commercial buyers, typically, our customers are all engineers.

So, having a sales professional in front of them who understands the problems they’re going through, the products, technology and standards they’re trying to meet is hugely beneficial.

They don’t really have time to see somebody who is just there to sell them a product.

They need someone who is going to give them new technical content, something educational or be able to have an open conversation with them – even if it’s not about the product.

Can you tell us a little more about INDO Lighting and its success and plans? 

INDO Lighting is an LED lighting manufacturer.

We came into the industry just before LEDs came into the market.

We had a few years of operating with one type of technology before fully embracing the move to LED.

Being relatively new to an established and traditional sector, INDO Lighting came in with new disruptive technology.

We’d seen the take-up of LED increase rapidly – and we needed to find a way to differentiate ourselves.

We managed this by developing our own electronics. INDO Lighting came in with a completely different approach to our competitors offering.

We worked directly with one of our customers to understand what products were missing from the market and looked at studies and research to see why customers were seeing products fail early in their expected life.

We established that it was the power supply part of the product (the Driver) and worked on removing that failure mode. We call our technology DirectDrive.

The team at INDO is constantly looking at new ways to improve products and find innovation in everything we do.

What have been your successes over the last year? 

Street lighting has become more complex and quite sophisticated.

For instance, the lighting column has the potential to be the central point for Wi-Fi, air quality monitors and a whole host of other technologies that can improve our streets.

At INDO, while we don’t manufacture sensors, we can make sure all our products support these devices now and for the future of Smart Cities.

We launched a product last year called SiCURA, which is our first sensor-ready luminaire; the product can provide an external power supply to sensors and devices that might be installed by the local authority.

It allows us to show that Direct Drive has the capabilities to match any of the big players in the market.

We design and manufacture everything ourselves, the fittings and the electronics which allows us to bring innovation and choice to our customers.

This year we kicked off a plan to diversify into new markets to ensure we are sustainable for the future.

We started this by moving into the rail industry, which is very complementary to the lighting industry.

And slightly more extreme diversification into the horticulture industry.

We identified that horticulture is a growing market – if you’ll pardon the pun – for LEDs.

Currently, for most commercial glasshouse growers, where they’re growing crops that require light and heat, they use high-pressure sodium – an old technology that is not as efficient as LED.

We saw the opportunity to develop a product using our Direct Drive technology and our knowledge and experience gained in street lighting and share that expertise with the horticulture industry.

What do you find most enjoyable about being the Managing Director? 

I’d say it’s seeing the successes, whether they’re small or big.

I love seeing our team succeed and the passion everyone has for the products we make and the business.

Everyone has a level of consciousness towards building and marketing the products and trying to give the best customer service we can.

Seeing how everybody pulls together to try and deliver the best we can is fantastic.

We’re a very open team and involve everybody is various stages of planning and decision making. We have a vision and shared purpose and try to work towards that without being too rigid around how we meet those targets.

Because they can see the potential, everyone involved in INDO has a vested interest in the business doing well and seeing us grow.

When we recruit, that’s what we’re looking for, we’re not just looking at the skills and qualifications to do the role, we’re looking for the right behaviours, attitude and ambition that will help INDO to reach its potential.

We talk about the ‘Why?’ quite a bit.

The premise of Simon Sinek’s Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action is that we quite quickly go to the how and what, but not necessarily the why.

Whenever we’re thinking about how we market a product and what we do with our customers, we often bring it back to the why.

Our why at INDO Lighting stems back to us having the true belief that the customers deserve the best that we can offer, they deserve a product that is trustworthy, honest and delivers what it says, they deserve great customer service whether they’re buying one product from us or thousands.

What are you particularly championing at INDO Lighting? 

The main thing we try to encourage throughout the business is ownership. Whether that’s ownership of your task, career, life – we encourage the team that it’s all in their own hands.

I believe that once you accept and take ownership for what you’re doing, you become more confident and powerful as a result of that.

There has to be structure and of course, there are targets and objectives, but how that filters through the team and how we achieve that has to be a two-way street.

We’d much rather our team members come forward and say, ‘this is what I’d like to do’.

If I’m the most expert person in the room, we’re doing something wrong.

What are the top skills that are necessary to move into the MD role? 

Adaptability is certainly one.

In any leadership role, whether its MD or senior management, you have different challenges and different people to deal with every day.

If you can’t adapt, then you’ll fall as you won’t be able to meet those challenges.

It takes a while to realise you must adapt first and show that to others to see it reciprocated.

Knowing when something’s not right and being able to pull it back is very important, as is having the confidence to stop it and try another direction.

In business, you must have plans, but I don’t like setting 3-5-year plans, targets and objectives are important but if you work to 18 months ahead, you should be able to be agile and pull things back if not on track.

You never get everything 100% right, but you learn every time you get something wrong.

Something I recently heard and liked is, sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

How was doing your MBA and how has it impacted you in the job? 

It was extremely tough at points.

I did it part-time alongside working full-time, I had to be really disciplined to get through it and there were a couple of times I wondered if it was worth it.

It absolutely was.

The MBA isn’t a standard degree or Masters, it teaches you business skills, which are life skills, in different contexts.

You’re learning the theory in a practical scenario.

I did an executive MBA, which is for people in business who have a level of management experience.

We worked on live projects, real-life context is why I chose to study this particular MBA.

I studied at the London Southbank, an enterprise university with an entrepreneurial approach that feeds into the courses.

I’m quite a practical person but the skills I learned in terms of discipline and different ways of thinking gave me more of an analytical approach.

Is it helping you in your role as MD now? 

Absolutely.

It’s like anything, you have to learn a lot of theory, submit coursework and take exams, and you think at the time you’ll never use the references again, but there are processes and theories I picked up during the course that I now use weekly.

What’s motivating and driving your employees, and how do you provide that for them? 

I think what motivates them is seeing that there’s a greater purpose; we’re not just coming to work to do our hours and go home at the end of the day.

We’re trying to progress and grow the business, and that will benefit everybody.

I think people truly believe in what we’re trying to do.

We’re a small business now, and can be more personable, but the way to maintain that as we grow is to have good lines of communication.

I think it’s really important we make sure the teams and people we deal with every day understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

As long as we maintain that, then I think we can sustain the motivation going forward.

When it comes time to not be MD at INDO, what would you hope your legacy would be? 

I’ve always worked for very large corporate businesses and INDO Lighting is the smallest business I’ve worked for.

If we still have that feeling of being close-knit, inclusive and collaborative once we’re 10 times the size we are, I think I’ll have done my job.

Interestingly, you chose something that’s about everyone in the business, rather than numbers and figures. 

We can’t make a product or sell it without people.

The business we work in – B2B – still needs a person and people buy from people.

If we look after our team and grow it in the right way, profits, credibility and growth will come with that as the team will want to keep delivering.

What do you do in your spare time? 

After I finished the MBA, I expected a revelation of spare time but what it made me realise is that if you plan well you can fit things in.

The lectures were mainly on Saturdays and lasted eight hours.

During the MBA we got an English bulldog puppy, so now my weekends are taken up with entertaining him.

He is hilarious and we spend a lot of time playing with him.

I like to travel and love going to visit new places.

I appreciate different cultures and food.

If I had to pick a favourite destination it would probably be New York City.

Do you have favourite books, podcasts? 

I recently got into podcasts.

During my studies I didn’t have time to read the textbooks so would listen to audiobooks while driving to cram the texts in!

Once I finished the course, I went back to listening to the radio but found it a bit boring, so I started listening to podcasts.

My current favourite is Mary Portas’ Work Like a Woman podcast, where she talks about different approaches and ways to deal with businesses.

It’s a really funny and interesting podcast, and she gets different guests on to talk about their experiences.

Is there a place/service you’d recommend to your peers? 

It might sound really obvious but as a business, we’ve started using LinkedIn a lot more.

Personally, I think it’s a great tool.

From a networking point of view and making sure we can establish and develop relationships with customers and future customers it’s really important.

We’ve always used it but in the last year, we’ve started utilising it a lot more.

About the Author

Ex-military engineer, Craig Elvin has more than 15 years’ experience working with clients and placing leaders in a range of sectors across the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Craig works with growing and ambitious businesses to attract, assess and nurture the best talent for critical leadership and senior managerial positions.

Click here to connect with Craig on LinkedIn.