A Warwickshire company that designs and makes roof trusses is taking on at least 12 new staff after moving to a new home and investing nearly £500,000 in its growth plans.
Nuneaton Roof Trusses was established 14 years ago by Scott McEwan and he has built the company up to a £3 million turnover business which employs around 20 staff.
Jack McMinn and Richard Britton have since joined as directors to help take it to the next level and they enlisted the support of the Coventry and Warwickshire Growth Hub to assist with its expansion.
Account manager Colin Hanson-New helped secure grants worth £85,000 to help with the purchase of a new £292,000 machine.
And the firm has also moved from Camp Hill to a unit three times the size in Weddington Terrace after being put in touch with Warwickshire County Council’s Gus Bhandal, the inward investment specialist at the Growth Hub.
The new jobs will be in design, manufacturing and administration and the changes will allow the company to push towards £6 million turnover in the coming year, with long-term plans to reach £10 million to £12 million turnover.
Jack said: “The support we have had has been invaluable. We would have pushed ahead with the plans to grow but it would have taken us much longer. The support through the Growth Hub means we can accelerate that and it’s good for us and for the local economy.”
The new machine will be the only one of its type in the UK and is due to arrive from Belgium in April but the company has already secured around £1 million worth of orders against it from national house builders.
Jack added: “When we receive the designs from national house builders, we can programme the new machine to cut the trusses to meet that design. They replicate their properties around the country so once we have the template, we can move into volume production for those companies – which is good for them, and us.
“Not only that, it takes around a minute to set-up each job where the current system is a 20-minute set-up – that is a lot of time saved and, again, means we can produce more.
“Further down the line, we want to install a biomass burner to heat and power the property. This in turn reduces our waste to landfill, as well as underlining our commitment to our long-term plan.”
The Coventry and Warwickshire Growth Hub is a new ‘one-stop-shop’ for support and advice for businesses, which was formed by the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership as part of its City Deal bid to Government.
Partners involved include the Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce, UKTI, Local Authorities across the sub-region, Coventry University, the University of Warwick and MAS (Manufacturing Advisory Service now part of Business Growth Service).
Craig Humphrey, managing director of the CW Growth Hub, said: “This is the perfect example of how the Growth Hub can help businesses in our manufacturing and engineering sector.
“Nuneaton Roof Trusses has ambitions for growth and believed that they would be able to get support in obtaining grant funding and expanding into new premises.
“By coming to the Growth Hub, they’ve successfully applied for an £85,000 grant to speed up the purchase of a new machine and we’ve managed to join the dots by helping the company to find the right property to meet their expansion programme.
“That has led to the creation of new job opportunities and is another success story for this region.”