Jacuzzi UK has been in a state of flux for some time, primarily because of a huge buyout and resulting strategic changes - including a 15% cut in its workforce. But managing director Mark Prince insists this has made it a more stable, streamlined outfit ready for the new market. Andrew Davies went to meet him...

In the middle of Jacuzzi's impressive new BC Sanitan showroom, the Duchess of Rutland is officially opening the facility by the traditional drawing back of a little curtain to reveal a plaque. 

An Englishman's home is his castle of course and for The Duchess that is literally true - Belvoir Castle to be precise, and it is being fitted out with all new BC Sanitan sanitaryware complete with family crest. She is, we must stress, paying for it...

Castles, duchesses, blue velvet curtains and commemorative plaques - surely nothing sums up the appeal of BC Sanitan more. It's as traditionally English as garden fetes, village greens and reluctant school trips to see places like Belvoir Castle.

But, despite its Englishness, it is owned by Jacuzzi UK, a company with a fierce Italian heritage, which is increasingly focused on whirlpool baths and hot tubs. Traditional English sanitaryware is an undeniably incongruous part of its portfolio.

"It's a small part of the overall business of course," says Jacuzzi UK managing director Mark Prince. "Probably about 5% of our sales, but BC Sanitan is a jewel in the middle of the organisation because, while it's a niche, there are very few competitors and it's a very attractive proposition. 

"There would be an argument that BC Sanitan could be nurtured better by a different parent, but the fact is that it's our kid at the moment, and we would rather nurture it, feed it and make it grow than see it perish off to one side. If it were a different type of proposition, if it were a low-profit product with little distinction, then we would probably have made the same decision as we have with the others and just stopped it."

The recent history of Jacuzzi UK, in which Prince is a principal player, could not be summed up better than in that last sentence. He was made managing director of the company in August 2006 - a promotion from MD of one of its offshoots, Astracast - only for the whole company to be bought out in February 2007 by private equity investment firm Apollo Management.

Straightaway it was clear that Apollo saw Jacuzzi as a turnaround and in an interview with kbbreview after the buyout, president and chief executive Tom Koos said he had come into an "almost dysfunctional" company.

So, three years on, what are the main changes?"There is much more focus on what I would call 'strategic intent'," Prince says. "In the old days, when we were part of a public company under Spring Ram or USI, it was all about what was happening over the next quarter, or what your sales were this week.

"Now it's much more about whether you're using your resources to attack areas in which you can really win. Are you doing the right things to make the company much more viable in two or three years' time?"

The most obvious example of this new approach is sanitaryware. BC Sanitan aside, Jacuzzi had made previous attempts to go into the mass market without any real success. This, Prince says, shows how far the company has come in a relatively short space of time.

"We make and sell high-quality sanitaryware with BC Sanitan, but we don't, to any real extent, buy it in and sell it on anymore, whereas before that was a big part of our sales. Low-end sanitaryware is a fool's game when you've got Roca, Twyford, and Ideal Standard in the market, as well as Travis Perkins and Wolseley buying stuff direct from the Far East."

The company's focus now is on baths and hot tubs, a move that seems obvious for a company whose name is synonymous with those products in the consumer's mind.

"The questions we ask ourselves now are 'how big is the market we have?' or 'what are our core capabilities?'" Prince says. "If those core markets are big enough, then stick at them, don't get distracted and put all your resources almost ruthlessly behind them. I think that is clearly working for us, but it's also pretty logical."

The Apollo buyout in February 2007 came when the market was in the last hedonistic throes of a boom. Within months, the first cracks in the economy were beginning to show before it crumbled into recession within a year. What did that mean for a company undergoing major changes under a new owner?

"There isn't a day that goes by where I don't give thanks for our timing," explains Prince. "This move that came in after the buyout to do the right things and concentrate on core activities meant that we took an awful lot of action to get ourselves refocused.

"So we were much leaner than we would otherwise have been coming into the recession. I wish I could say it was because we saw the downturn coming, but it wasn't, it was pure luck."

Becoming leaner means cutting costs in facilities and people and while the first stages of that process protected it better than most against the start of the recession, the process is only now coming to an end. 

As recently as July, Jacuzzi UK announced it was cutting another 90 jobs - 15% of its workplace in this country - in line with its strategy of focusing on core products.Fifty of these were from manufacturing and warehousing, and the other 40 from across the company. The jobs are, Prince says, mostly from "areas more synonymous with a company in turnaround".

"We've taken a lot of cost out of the system and refocused our cost base on those things that were working really well. And we're still doing that today. That sometimes means we end up restructuring and that results in people with skills that we don't need having to leave and recruiting people with the skills we do need. That's an ongoing feature of the business."

No matter how many cuts are made or restructures implemented, the state of the market itself is still a variable that Prince admits is hard to track. "At one time, I would've taken great pride in how good we were at forecasting, but it's not like that anymore. You've almost got to redesign a company around the principle that, with a few exceptions, you frankly haven't got a clue what you're going to sell."

Any changes in the fortunes of Jacuzzi have been entirely down to the initiatives it has implemented, Prince says, rather than an upturn in the market.

"There are actually a few strands of our business that I think of as bellwethers," he explains. "The very stable areas where it's unlikely that our market share will change. If they're up or down, then the market is up or down by the same measure. Without exception, they're all still down and the market is down and still going down."

With the market still contracting, Jacuzzi's relationship with its retailers is more important than ever, and it's one that hasn't always been smooth.

"I think they don't like the amount of change that we've been through," Prince admits. "They think that we've tried, in some cases, to offer them product that they didn't need from us and our reorganisations have broken relationships that they valued. In doing so, we haven't always given the best customer service.

"Now, judging by the number that are re-engaging very actively with us, I think they'd say our service was second to none. We have by far the best brand, and we are settling down to service them with the kind of products they want to buy.

There's a lot of people out there that we have been very supportive of during their own difficulties, and we haven't asked for anything back, other than that they hopefully remember that goodwill and consider us if we offer them the right product at the right price with the right brand."