[jonbxx]

Originally Posted by Angua

British Businesses seem very unprepared for a no deal Brexit. No doubt people will whinge about scare mongering, but many SMEs have little capacity to plan for Brexit and government seem to have their heads in the sand over this.

I was asking about contingencies in the company I work in at the country and local level. Apparently our country lead is spending a lot of time talking to politicians about this!

We have already closed one manufacturing plant and there are rumours that some manufacturing at another plant will be moved to China. This is based on it being expensive to make things in the UK but easy to do business internationally. If it becomes harder to do business internationally, then we may well move things to somewhere were it's cheaper to make things.

At a local level, we have many EU employees based in the UK and the focus is very much on staff retention - we don't want talented staff to leave the company and about 20% of the workforce are non-UK EU citizens. Our company is offering to support and indeed pay for any residency applications for EU staff. Some staff have stated they want to leave the UK and we have offered remote working from their destination countries as an option again to retain talent.

I am sure the question will come up - why can't we employ UK staff and the simple answer is twofold - we want the best people in their roles and the need for language skills

All of our distribution is from an EU country but we do already have experience of shipping to non-EU countries of all flavours so this is more of a training and staffing issue for our UK customer service team. We will almost certainly need to take on more staff however.

We have already passed on costs to our customers due to the drop in GBP and have adopted a flexible pricing strategy rather than setting one price in January to allow for currency volatility as we don't report in GBP.

There's a lot going on but luckily I work in a company big enough to absorb the difficulties