I've just been browsing a couple of old issues of Real Classic and came across an interview of Stuart Garner by Alan Cathcart. This section makes interesting reading in hindsight:
"I think l'm in a different place than other motorcycle manufacturers, in that as you know having been the first person to interview me back ten years ago when it all started at the height or maybe the depths of the GFC in 2008, I didn't get into this for the money. I was a happy lad before I bought Norton, with the game farm in South Africa and my fireworks business in the UK both making good money. We've got the business to where it is now - we're not making any money yet, but we're having the time of our lives, and it looks from our order book as if we're finally going to eliminate the red ink from our balance sheet. But if I sold Norton for telephone numbers of sterling or dollars or euros, what would I do with the money? Because l've already paid to be in John McGuinness's garage at the lsle of Man Tl or to have the fastest and most powerful British streetbike yet made to ride around the hills and dales of Derbyshire - l'm doing that anyway, so I don't know what ld do with the money, and therefore, why sell it?
And then the other reason is, we've all put so much bloody time and effort into the business, it would be like selling one of my kids, and you wouldn't do that, would you? Anyway, we've got an obligation to the welders here at Norton, to the engineers, to the apprentices that we've taken on, and l'll be beggared if l've put ten years into this to sell it to a venture capitalist who rapes it over the next three years, doubles his money, loads it with debt, and then it goes bust and puts everyone out of work.What a waste that would be.
So I do think that for Norton to be successful long term, it needs to be privately owned and managed with a very tight equity base around that owner/manager. When you look around and you see some successful businesses out there today that have been successful for a long period of time, the corporates in their pin-striped suits have been kept out the way, and strong family ownership has seen the company flourish, not merely survive. Look at JCB just up the road for example - a great modern British success story under family ownership, same as Triumph. So the Garner family is in Norton for the long term, and I look forward to speaking to you 20 years from now about how Norton has built on where we are ten years down the line! APRIL 2019 "
