How Merseyside Manufacturers Can Develop Customers Beyond Existing Accounts

Merseyside has a genuinely capable manufacturing base, much of it built up over decades of supplying the same core group of customers — often other established regional or national manufacturers, distributors, or businesses connected to the port and its supply chains. That stability has real value. It has also, in a lot of cases, quietly become a risk.

It is common to find a Merseyside manufacturer where two or three customers account for well over half of turnover. Nobody set out to build the business that way; it simply happened, one good year of growth with a favoured customer at a time. The difficulty only becomes visible when one of those accounts is lost, re-tendered, or brought in-house, and there is no pipeline of alternative customers ready to take its place.

This article looks at how Merseyside manufacturers can develop new customers deliberately, without disturbing the existing accounts that continue to pay the bills.

Why concentration risk builds up quietly on Merseyside

Manufacturing businesses in Liverpool, Birkenhead, St Helens, Widnes and the wider Merseyside area often grew through a small number of strong customer relationships, sometimes going back a generation. Serving those customers well is genuinely good business — it is efficient, it builds deep product knowledge, and it rewards reliability over price.

The problem is that this growth model has no natural brake. Nobody decides to become dependent on three customers; it happens because saying yes to more work from an existing, trusted relationship is always easier than pursuing an unfamiliar one. Over several years, the business ends up structurally exposed without anyone having made that decision on purpose.

What counts as too concentrated?

There is no single number that applies to every business, but a useful rule of thumb is this: if the top three customers account for more than 40% of turnover, business development is no longer a growth activity. It is risk management, and it should be treated with the same urgency as any other material commercial risk.

Why manufacturers hesitate to diversify

• Existing accounts absorb most of the available capacity, leaving little time for genuine new business activity.
• Sales effort has historically meant account management and quoting, not prospecting — so the skills and habits for finding new customers were never built.
• New customer development takes months to show results, while an existing account can be grown with a phone call.
• There is a fear that chasing new business will distract from, or even irritate, the customers the business currently relies on.

A practical approach to diversifying the customer base

1. 01Quantify concentration honestly, by customer and by sector, rather than relying on a general sense that 'a few big accounts matter a lot'.
2. 02Identify adjacent sectors or geographies where existing capability, accreditation and product range already transfer — this is nearly always faster than developing genuinely new capability.
3. 03Build a named target account list separate from the day-to-day quoting queue, so new business does not simply get crowded out by existing account demands.
4. 04Give someone specific, protected time for new customer development each week, rather than treating it as something to fit in around servicing existing accounts.
5. 05Track new business pipeline separately from account management activity, so progress against concentration risk is visible rather than assumed.

This is not about neglecting existing accounts

Reducing concentration risk does not mean deprioritising the customers who built the business. It means making sure the business is not entirely dependent on decisions made outside its control — a procurement review, an in-sourcing decision, a competitor's price, or a change of buyer at a key account. The strongest position is one where existing accounts keep growing and new ones are being added in parallel.

What to do next

Our sales consultancy in Liverpool page sets out how this kind of work is typically structured for manufacturing businesses in the region. The first useful step is usually the honest concentration calculation above, followed by identifying two or three adjacent sectors where existing capability already gives a credible route in.