Tom Flude and Corey Faulconbridge are taking on the global engineering industry – from one of their bedrooms in Ash Green. The best friends first met as students at Nicholas Chamberlaine School in Bedworth and now, years later, have combined their skills to launch their own business – Engineers Insight.
It provides a digital platform for the manufacturing industry to find everything and anything they need – and they say some of their customers are multi-billion pound companies. Tom gave up his job in the industry to launch the business, which he said was born out of spotting a gap in the industry.
His knowledge, combined with Corey’s technological skills, proved to be the perfect combination. Their shared passion started at school.
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“We were best friends inside and out of school, we played football together,” Tom said. “We used to buy and sell stuff from eBay and Gumtree after school, we were entrepreneurial kids.”
The 29-year-old went on: “Three years ago, I just had this idea, I was frustrated in my day job and thought that someone needed to come up with something better and I spoke to Corey and he said ‘yes we can build it’. My family have always been engineers, my nan and grandad owned an engineering company that my dad and uncle worked for and, out of school, I started doing electrical engineering at college and then started working for Schneider Electric, which is one of the biggest manufacturers in the world.
“Corey, is my co-founder, after school, he got an apprenticeship with Capgemini and became a software developer. It was like the perfect crossover between the two of us. I came up with the business idea and had the network and Corey has the skills to make it happen..”
He left his job at the end of November last year: “We were spinning so many plates that we couldn’t keep up, I was in a very good day job in manufacturing but that was taking a back seat to our business. Corey is the software guy making it happen from his bedroom and I am out selling it and doing the marketing.
“The place that we are at now is finding our market fit. We came up with the idea a few years ago to help manufacturers to get products to market and now it has snowballed into a central platform for everything engineering, not just finding product.”
They said: “It was out of frustration really, for such a technology driven industry, we (the industry) were so far behind in marketing, so we really depend heavily on print publications still, a lot of the industry magazines hold the monopoly and no-one has come out with a digital platform before.
“That is the gap in the market, that is what we are trying to fill, it is the central agnostic platform for the industry, not linked to any one manufacturer, it is about helping engineers source from everyone.”
They incorporated the company in March 2019. The ultimate goal is to establish ‘Engineers Insight in the UK and Ireland and then take it out to the rest of the world.
“The plan is that we do the Beta testing and we get thousands of engineers in the UK and Ireland on board, we want to prove the concept and how the business model stretches,” Mr Flude said. “We want to become software as a service and will be subscription based.
“But to get to that point, we have to bring so much value to the engineer that the engineering companies actually want to pay for us to be able to aggregate all of the documentation and to be able to build the machine in our platform. Once we are at that point, it will then be how do we take on ‘Engineers Insight’ to Germany, France or China.”
To find out how about ‘Engineers Insight’ visit their Facebook page here
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