For over a century, Survitec has been working on Survival Technology solutions. It is a company whose history is one of innovation and first-to-market personal survival equipment used by people ejecting from aircraft or working at sea.
“There are a lot of firsts that go back even a hundred years. We were the first to market with liferafts, marine evacuation systems, immersion suits and more,” says Robert Kledal, CEO of Survitec. “I think that’s great.”
While any company is quick to talk about its products and inventions, Kledal is also keen to emphasise Survitec’s purpose as a company.
“In this day and age the concept of ‘purpose’ has gotten new life,” Kledal tells us. “A lot of companies out there are searching for their purpose, but we were born with ours over a century ago. We exist to protect lives, which is a purpose that will never go out of fashion. We don’t need to make it seem sexy because it’s already such a strong reason to exist. That for me is Survitec in a nutshell.”
Predominantly Survitec serves men and women in uniform, seafarers, and offshore crews. Backed up by a strong product portfolio and strong product development skills, Survitec has built a global footprint of offices and service stations that enable it to stay close to customers.
“We serve one of the most global and mobile segments in the world – ships. There is no more global industry, by definition. For me, that global footprint of customer engagement is a unique selling point,” Kledal insists. “We have well-educated field technicians who receive regular training and certification. A benefit of being one of the few truly global players in the sector is that we can apply our training and best practice across all our sites.”
Engaging Challenges
The primary challenge Survitec is focused on is keeping its customers and end-users alive in dangerous situations, but the company must also navigate difficult economic waters. The runaway inflation that is having an impact on businesses across all sectors is felt particularly keenly by production and OEM businesses.
“It has led to the rise of every cost category. We have seen inflation on material costs, labour costs, and freight costs,” Kledal points out. “We have quite a complex supply chain, with limited scope for suppliers. This has led to price hikes, and when you then take the many thousands of products we have globally into consideration, passing that on through pricing is a huge and significant challenge. In that situation, you want to balance customer loyalty but must pass some cost increases on.”
Facing a challenge like this, Kledal immediately put his best people onto the problem.
“When you have a sudden new challenge, you take very good people away from other tasks to solve it,” he says. “We have doubled down on understanding our pricing process because prices increase every year.”
Inputting costs from thousands of different vendors, Survitec looked at how it could reduce those costs, building that knowledge into engineering processes, procurement, and the supply chain.
“On the output side, you have to educate your salespeople who are used to negotiating from a stable cost base, rather than one that suddenly hikes to 30% higher than it was two years ago,” Kledal adds. “That takes quite a lot of hard work and rolling up your sleeves. It means reprioritising talent, costs and margins and communicating the hell out of your approach to the organisation.”
Creating Magic Moments
One challenge that Survitec does not have much trouble with is recruitment, with employees drawn to the company’s purpose. However, as the nature of the workplace has changed in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Survitec needs to find ways to adapt.
“Working in manufacturing production and service, those are jobs where people need to be on-site five days a week,” Kledal says. “There is a global trend of people wanting to work remotely, so we are still navigating that field where two-thirds of our people don’t have that luxury because they are field technicians or on a production line.”
Kledal also values the benefits of an on-site company culture, although he too is looking at ways to adapt.
“I often ask myself, am I being a pre-Covid age dinosaur when I say people need to be in the office more?” he admits. “But the office is where you build culture, connections and teamwork and ultimately where you build that whole company DNA. That’s something we’re still finding our way through.”
The attitude to remote work is noticeably different the closer you get to production and manufacturing.
“It has been interesting to see that on the locations where we have a production site or a service station, office people have also found it more natural to come in,” Kledal observes. “On sites that are more corporate by nature, it has been harder to get people back into the office.”
Survitec is working to ensure colleagues are on-site and in the office at the same time whilst also allowing for the flexibility of remote working.
“Otherwise, people’s presence in the office does not synchronise, which defeats the point of the culture building,” Kledal says. “Innovative processes in product development and marketing need that touch point of ‘Why don’t we try this?’, which I found to be lacking when you have to set up a video conference rather than just pop by their desk. A lot of little magical moments happen when people stand at the water cooler or sit down for lunch.”
Kledal is keen to create more of those moments as he realises his vision for the future of Survitec.
“Any CEO that comes in dreams big,” Kledal says. “I want us to be the most trusted Survival Technology provider out there. The first step for me is driven by wanting to utilise our talents better and more reliably.”
For Kledal, this means truly global reach.
“We have an opportunity to strengthen our global value proposition by providing more autonomy and accountability to those working directly with our customers on the front line,” Kledal says.
That value proposition means stretching beyond Survitec’s core markets in the maritime and aerospace sectors while building on its core competencies in inflatables and products that can withstand arctic winds, tropical climates, fire and cold.
“I think you can take that beyond marine and aerospace and defence,” Kledal says.
But wherever Survitec goes, it will continue to be driven by its singular purpose – “We Exist to Protect Lives”.
“Some of the beauty that happens in a company like ours is we can link a life raft to the person who certified it,” Kledal says. “If our product saves someone’s life, the worker who made that possible can meet the person whose life they saved. Those moments are worth a lot.”
