Top Tubes’ Managing Director reflects on an award-winning year and the path ahead
Over the course of its 31-year history, Top Tubes has become the heart of tube manufacturing in the West Midlands, UK. Located in Wednesbury, the business has grown to encompass over 150 employees with a turnover of between £40 million and £50 million depending on steel and supply chain pricing.
Top Tubes offers a comprehensive range of products and services, enabling it to have total control over both quality and cost. A slitting line capable of processing 60,000 tonnes of steel coil annually feeds two precision steel tube mills, which in turn feed a fleet of state-of-the-art tube lasers. This capability allows the company to offer unique solutions to other businesses controlling the tube manufacturing supply chain and providing the company with a leading advantage within the industry. 
Chris Mann, Top Tubes’ Sales Director, joins us to share a more detailed overview of the company’s services: “The main element of what we do is rolling electric resistance welding (ERW) precision tubes. We supply the market with around 40,000 tons of tube each year. In addition, we also have a fleet of five laser cutting machines, which enable us to provide various tube cutting operations for customers.” Thanks to its turn-key solutions, Top Tubes supplies a wide array of industries, including automotive, agricultural, temporary fencing, healthcare and furniture. As Chris points out: “It’s a wide scope representing a huge variety of applications.”
Continuing, Chris elaborates on the advantages to offering these services in house: “We’re the only company in the UK that can slit coil, roll ERW precision tube, and laser process the tubes under one roof. This enables us to have the highest levels of quality assurance across all our processes by ensuring only the highest quality materials are used.
“Additionally, we also maintain our own extensive logistics fleet, enabling us to cover the entirety of the UK. Having the full suite of services in-house allows us significant flexibility and effectiveness when dealing with customer demands, eliminating frustrations or disappointments from third parties which might let our customers down. This means we can provide our clients with an unrivalled service. In the UK for example, there are numerous businesses that can slit coil, one other tube manufacturer, and many suppliers of laser cut tubes, none of these businesses though, are able to offer one unified solution under a single roof, whereas we can.”
With the business going from strength to strength, part of its success has been driven by investment in laser cutting services. Chris elaborates on the strategy behind this impressive uptick: “Laser cutting is a highly competitive marketplace but provides added value in terms of Top Tubes’ long term growth strategy. We recently installed our fifth laser which creates more headroom capacity to take on additional projects from our end user customers.
“Around the UK there are circa 100 tube laser cutting machines installed at various companies, these represent our direct competition. It’s quite a fragmented market but this does provide us with great opportunities for growth. The strategy behind installing our fifth laser was to increase our capacity so we had the ability to more actively target these opportunities. Part of our longer-term vision involves making sound investments during flatter periods in the market, making sure we align ourselves with market leading flexibility so when the market begins to pick up again Top Tubes is an agile strategic partner of choice for our customers both existing and new.”
Equipment and machinery are not the only areas of the business that have recently been updated. With social media playing a bigger role in businesses across almost all industries, the company saw the opportunities presented by an expanded online presence. Chris explains how this has positively impacted the business: “Up until two years ago Top Tubes published very little social media content besides sporadic LinkedIn posts and the old website was relatively basic. We needed a marketing strategy to be deployed to elevate the business so we mapped out what that would look like and how we could start to create some brand awareness. We are posting twice a week on LinkedIn to create some visible traction and ramp up clicks and views while maintaining consistent messaging, and a broader visibility drive. Additionally, over the last 12 months we have significantly increased our content production. This has helped elevate Top Tubes’ presence not only locally, but also nationally, launching a new company website and corporate video. A wider investment in our marketing strategy has underpinned all of this. As a result, we have been nominated for significantly more industry awards. We have used this platform to bring some brilliant PR to the business.”
The business has also evolved its approach to the development of future talent, seeing the benefits that arise from longer-term strategies, but also transforming the company’s recruitment experience. April Pearson-Myatt, Top Tubes’ Managing Director sheds some light on the approach: “Historically the business has steered away from apprenticeships due to the number of resources required to establish a successful program. Now though, we have a very strong HR department and have embraced this approach, investing heavily in all training areas. We have been able to improve the skillset of our managers, and we have gotten to the point where we have the facilities to bring on apprentices. More importantly though, we want Top Tubes to be a business that people want to come and work for – we want people banging on the door! This represents a reversal to the historical situation where we would have to go out and actively recruit talent. The fact that we now have a successful apprenticeship program means that we have a constant flow of talent into the business, which is really refreshing, because there is a lot of great talent out there that we want to foster into our next generation of managers.
“This approach is helping drive the business forward; our apprentices are knowledgeable, bringing with them new ideas, including how to incorporate AI into different processes. Having this input across all the different departments within the business is having a transformational effect.”
Before concluding April takes a moment to reflect on the impact of winning the 2024 SME Manufacturer of the Year Award: “It provides the team with a huge amount of pride because their efforts are being recognized, not only internally but against competitors who are often secretive. It provides the whole company with a massive confidence boost.
“Our future goals are to continue the program of improvements that have already made a massive difference, so that we can become best in class, an employer of choice. Our home-grown next generation of talent will be a huge part of that push. Alongside all the operational and organizational improvements, we are laser focused on assessing costs and profitability. With our Top Tubes strategy at the core of everything we do, we are confident we can actualize these goals, in turn generating year on year growth in our profit figures.”