The price war you can never win

Martyn Buxton has spent over fifteen years in UK manufacturing, most of them watching the same thing happen to the same businesses: they compete on price, they grind, they look for ways to undercut whoever just undercut them, and eventually they hit a ceiling they can't get through.

LB Enclosures were doing the same thing. Mass-produced aluminium enclosures, off-the-shelf stock, chasing the same orders as everyone else in a small industry with a limited customer pool. It was a decent business. It just wasn't going anywhere interesting, and the price race was a losing game, and Martyn knew it.

This episode is about what happened when they stopped pretending it was sustainable, found the work they excelled at, and built a business around that instead. Martyn is the MD of LB Enclosures, a West Sussex manufacturer that now makes custom aluminium enclosures and housings for inventors, engineers and product developers.

Martyn’s One Thing was finding your niche and living it. Sounds easy, but the road to success is winding and bumpy at times, but absolutely worth it.

We’ve pulled out some key insights you can apply to your own business.

The niche is probably already there.

Is there a type of work that keeps showing up, yet feels like a distraction? Maybe you love doing it, but it’s not your ‘bread and butter.’

For LB Enclosures, that work was what Martyn refers to as the ‘fag packet sketches.’ Customers would show up with a brilliant idea, a rough plan and a literal box of bits, emptied onto the desk, with a "can you turn this into a product?"

The team kept treating this as a distraction from the main work. The interesting stuff they loved doing, but wasn't quite as profitable. The design-heavy, boys-and-toys, Meccano-set jobs that took time and didn't come in the same tidy volumes as the standard runs.

LB Enclosures were offering those customers a complete solution: design, renders, a finished product, and UK manufacturing with quick turnaround times. When you're launching a new electronics product, being first to market is a significant advantage. Getting from idea to finished enclosure in days rather than months is not a small thing. So suddenly, you’re not selling a metal box; you’re selling a whole solution.

You want partners, not customers.

This small language change makes a real difference, and Martyn is specific about it. A customer can leave the moment a cheaper option appears. A partner is embedded in what you do; they come back because leaving means starting again with someone who doesn't know their product, their tolerances, their history. The relationship is part of the product.

LB Enclosures don’t try to undercut anyone on a metal box. They are the engineers who already know your product and can spot a design that won't physically fit before you've ordered anything. You can ring them when something needs changing at short notice, and even visit, walk around the factory floor with, and watch your product get made.

When you're a small UK manufacturer in a world where people are increasingly used to clicking a button and getting a part the same afternoon, your answer to that isn't to try to match the click-and-ship model. It's to offer something the click-and-ship model can't.

How can you position your product or service as more of a partnership?

Consult the team first

When Martyn decided they needed to change direction, he approached the team first.

Engineers, he points out, are not naturally drawn to change. They like process and repeatability and doing things the same way they were done yesterday, because that's how you get accuracy and consistency. He was now asking them to do something very different from what they'd been doing. So before he tried to sell it up the organisation, he sold it sideways. He sat down with the team and said: Look at the bespoke work we've done. Look what we've managed to achieve. I know it's going to be harder. I know it's going to take longer. But would you be up for it?

Turns out, this was the work the team loved best. Getting them on board first meant that when he went to the owner, he was bringing a "here's what we want to do and here's who's behind it" conversation, not a "trust me" conversation.

The founder, it turned out, was immediately excited. He'd started the business because he couldn't find what he wanted from other manufacturers. The niche being described absolutely suited who he was.

Then comes the accountant. That's always the tricky bit. New machines, new processes, an additional unit, a conversation about what the return looks like. It wasn’t easy, but they found grants, made the case, and moved.

Don't expect it to all go smoothly.

Big changes don’t happen in a straight line. With the benefit of hindsight, Martyn can describe the pivot as a clean story with a clear arc. At the time, it wasn’t. The rebrand took longer than expected. The marketing didn’t work at first. Some of the people they brought in didn’t understand what they were trying to do. Some of the money went on things that didn’t move the needle.

At one point, Martyn designed what he thought was the perfect one: screws in the corners, a full colour-blend running down the edge, the whole thing styled to look like an end plate for one of his enclosures. He ordered a thousand, and they arrived looking like a test print.

His advice from it: don’t be a busy fool. Know what you’re not good at and find people who are, specifically people who’ll listen to what you’re trying to build rather than shoehorn you into what they usually do.

Martyn is a comic book fan. He quotes Batman: why do we fall? So we can pick ourselves back up. You fall, you get back up, and now you know something you didn’t before you fell.

The businesses that make it through a pivot are the ones that treat failure or bumps in the road as information. If something doesn’t work, you know it, and you know what to do differently. The goal isn’t to avoid making mistakes. It’s to not make the same thousand business cards twice.

What's the box of bits on your desk?

Martyn is fifteen years into a decision he describes as categorically the best one the business ever made. If they'd stayed competing on price, he says plainly, they'd be out of business by now. The world changed. The Amazon effect hit manufacturing hard. If you're just selling a standard part, the consumer has got very used to clicking a button and getting it tomorrow. You can't win that game as a small UK manufacturer.

What you can win is the game where the relationship, the knowledge, and the fact that you've been inside someone's product development for three years are worth a lot more than the lowest price in the room.

You don't have to be in manufacturing for these lessons to translate. The pattern Martyn describes is recognisable across many businesses: the ceiling on price competition, the work that feels like a distraction but keeps coming back, the moment of deciding to build around what you're really good at rather than what you thought was your ‘bread and butter.’

Hopefully some food for thought here for you and your business.

Martyn Buxton is the MD of LB Enclosures. You can find him on LinkedIn or at lbenclosures.com.