20 yrs is a long time full stop. But in business and in such a challenging market, it’ s at least one lifetime, if not more. Longevity doesn’ t just happen and moreover it cannot be taken for granted as you look to the future and the possibility of the next 20 yrs.
SEPTEMBER 2025 | 27
20 yrs is a long time full stop. But in business and in such a challenging market, it’ s at least one lifetime, if not more. Longevity doesn’ t just happen and moreover it cannot be taken for granted as you look to the future and the possibility of the next 20 yrs.
20 yrs is a long time full stop. But in business and in such a challenging market, it’ s at least one lifetime, if not more. Longevity doesn’ t just happen and moreover it cannot be taken for granted as you look to the future and the possibility of the next 20 yrs.
Staying relevant when the world, the ways of doing business in it and customer preference seem to change week to week is a challenge. With this in mind, since taking on the role of CEO in Feb 24 my focus has been listening to customers and our colleagues to understand what we as a business need to solve in order to align with our two biggest stakeholders. Despite this being our 20th year, we can take nothing for granted and need to constantly listen and act in order to evolve in line with our market.
This deliberate strategy has taken time but allowed us to focus on defining what needs to be done and devising a plan to get there. We’ ve taken a multi-year view with some key milestones to achieve along the way. It’ s early days but feedback from our client focus groups, customer advocacy scores via NPS and staff surveys have surpassed our expectations and appear to be endorsing our direction of travel.
There are many things that the team have achieved in this period with our vertically integrated model affording the control to design and execute solutions in house, some highlights being:-
• Reducing the lead time of our standard product to 7 working days delivered.
• Invested heavily in recycling to keep creation of recycled product in house and providing a scalable platform to increase the amount of recycled content in our product over time in line with our ESG strategy.
• Enhanced our packaging using direct customer feedback to assist with installation & reducing our carbon footprint.
• Refreshed our core VS brand and relaunched the ECOSlide ® brand, the latter being consumer focussed and geared towards driving leads to our customers.
• Launched a deep bottom rail offering and improved the weather performance of our product; the latter a new minimum standard our customers can expect.
• Launching our VS Values, distilling the very essence of what we feel makes us who we are and underpins what our customers can expect now and in the future.
As you can see, it’ s been busy but we’ re not stopping there. I’ d summarise the aims over the next 3yrs into 4 pillars:-
1. Proactively working with our customers to support them in achieving their growth aspirations using a variety of different tools. One of which will be the launch of online quotation / ordering with AI integration to allow us to be and remain a growth enabler as AI becomes an increasing feature of every market.
2. Supporting our customers to deliver in a broader range of commercial end markets as well as the traditional RMI segment, creating greater revenue visibility & a little more certainty. Something we’ ve worked hard to lay firm foundations in over the last 12 months and will leverage our sector credentials to drive
mutual growth. This shared ambition with our clients has supported delivery of larger contracts in social housing, leisure, education markets to name but a few.
3. Utilising our in house design team to further enhance our range with the aim being to provide a product portfolio from entry level right the way through to the top end of the UPVC sash window market segment.
4. Investing in our colleagues by providing defined career paths within our business with training to help our people deliver on their aspirations and enabling our people to grow as we grow.
There’ s much still to do but we are clear on the way forward. These are exciting times for our colleagues and customers and we relish the challenge of the next 20 yrs and remaining the preeminent player in our market.
Nick Evans
CEO, Victorian Sliders