Hard times in the past for watch company which is now ticking along nicely

Aug 20 2008 by Alex Turner, Liverpool Daily Post

Alex Turner meets ANGUS MATHESON, managing director of In-Time Watch Services

TWENTY-SEVEN years’ experience in the watch repair industry doesn’t mean that Angus Matheson is willing to take a patient approach to problems.

A quick greeting is followed by murmurings about his new printer, which is noisily churn-ing out page after page of printing.

Watches can’t be turned off, he mentions. When the crown is pulled out so the hands don’t move, the battery is still churning away.

Just like the printer next to the managing director of In-Time Watch Services, who has just found that his printer doesn’t have an ”off switch”.

But that doesn’t faze him. “It’ll switch off when I pull the plug on it,” he said decisively.

And, with his very modern problem solved, he’s ready to relive the journey he’s been on since setting up a watch repair business with his father in 1981 which now looks after more than 500,000 customers a year from its 50 outlets from Inverness to Plymouth.

“Journey is a good word for it,” said Mr Matheson, who then sped through 18 years’ work in a sentence.

“The family business my father and I set up in 1981 grew with our own resources to 1999.”

In 1999, the company was bought by the Minit Group that owned a similar French chain which had 4,500 stores worldwide.

Again, Mr Matheson gives just a moment’s thought to the eight years when he had to revert to being an employee of what had previously been his company.

He continued: “But they had a number of problems which lingered and the company has now been broken up. The shoe repair was sold to Timpsons, while Sketchleys and Jeeves of Belgravia were sold to Johnsons.

“We were the one bit left in the UK of the original business, so I put together a management buy-out (MBO).”

Later he returned to the time spent under Minit Group ownership, but still in his typically understated way.

“We were very restricted in making investment in the company. We couldn’t make medium or long-term decisions. The business stagnated, we were starved of cash.”

That changed with the MBO, which was supported by £1.1m from Merseyside Special Investment Fund’s Venture Fund and the directors’ own investment.

“The MBO took a lot longer than we expected. We agreed a price on Sept 1, 2006, but it took until March 1, 2007.

“It’s been fantastic to get back in control.”