Hi, I’m Alex.

I started out as a programmer. With two friends from the marketing agency where we worked, I co-founded Fittingly, a furniture manufacturer. We went from nothing to £1.5M in our first year, and that’s where I fell for manufacturing: the machines, the systems, the processes.

As technical director, my job was to build what let us grow that fast without falling over. We started fully on paper. By the end, machine programs were planned automatically, every part was barcode-scanned in real time, and our own ERP reacted the moment a component was lost or damaged, so we could run just-in-time. Lead times fell from about four months to four weeks, and we doubled turnover in the same floor space with the same shop-floor team.

None of that came from one big plan. It came from talking to people at every level, doing the jobs myself and finding the real pain points, then iterating fast. Big ideas sometimes came to nothing; tiny tweaks often made all the difference. A system only works if it works on the shop floor.

We reached almost £5M in five years and were acquired by Sharps, a much larger competitor. I stayed on as technical director for nearly three years and led the integration: moving our deliveries onto their fleet cut the cost per delivery from £150 to £40, and I planned the move of our whole factory into theirs. Then I left to help other manufacturers get the same results from technology, AI and well-planned systems, without needing a technical director of their own.