What Really Happened
Smart Garden Offices was, for many years, the UKs largest and most pre-eminent designer and manufacturer of garden offices in the UK, with the company creating hundreds of garden rooms every year.
Smart was multi–award-winning and, individually Charlie won the IOD Director of the Year in 2017 in Eastern Counties and was featured in Director magazine.
He then developed Zedbox – the first range of mainstream moveable residential garden annexes in the UK.
Demand was enormous, and the combined businesses grew to over 100 staff with an order book totalling £12million.
Following the enormous growth in Smart Garden Offices and Zedbox during 2016-2018, Charlie recruited heavily into the management teams of both companies.
Charlie brought in additional managers into Smart in 2018 and into Zedbox in 2019. The new team at Smart settled in quite quickly and requested a management buyout of the Smart business.
However, in a separate chain of events, the new Managing Director at Zedbox and his team plotted, it’s believed, to deliberately bust the Zedbox companies in order for them to personally acquire the assets at a knock down rate. Their plan, it’s suggested, was to strip the Zedbox businesses of all assets, branding, the order book, to close the current and planned factory and to make all UK staff redundant whilst outsourcing all aspects of production overseas.
Charlie, who at the time was recovering from a serious illness and remained absent, agreed the sale of Smart to the MBO team and planned to refinance the next stage of additional in-house growth at Zedbox, remained unaware of the Zedbox executives’ plans.
During the Spring of 2019, these Zedbox executives conspired with a local property developer, of some renown, to remove several Zedbox display assets (worth in excess of £70,000 alone) from the company - but the funds never reached the company’s bank account. Shortly afterwards these executives claimed they were unable to pay any salaries to the Zedbox staff and made all employees instantly redundant.
During this time, it later became apparent, that these Zedbox executives also determined the customer service teams should not return any calls or communication with any clients or suppliers who were becoming increasingly concerned about the situation. It’s evident that the Managers of the Zedbox businesses were acting quite inappropriately and, in one case, in breach of fiduciary duties as the de facto Director of the Company (as verified by RSM accountants).
All staff, suppliers and customers of Zedbox were treated appallingly during this period in, what now appears to be, a determined effort by several individuals to up-end the business for their perceived personal gain.
As owner, Charlie Dalton returned to the business, despite his ill health, in early May 2019 and was left with no alternative but to place the Zedbox businesses into receivership and to arrange the fire sale of Smart to the MBO team to save the 50 jobs there. He appointed insolvency specialists RSM to formally liquidate the Zedbox UK Ltd, Zedbox Ltd and PDS Worldwide. Their investigation later unearthed the performance of the management team, in particular the new Managing Director’s sale of company assets at the time of the interim Cashflow position.
In the end, the sale of Smart became a fire sale that released only enough funds to pay the solicitors and accountants.
Some months later, and with the support of several former members of Zedbox staff and suppliers, Charlie Dalton slowly started to plan a return to the annexe market in a small and modest manner – and to commence the long journey to try to repay creditors of businesses that his Zedbox management team had destroyed.
