Our Managing Director, Nathan began working life playing professional football for Hull City AFC, on their Youth Training Scheme (YTS), earning £27.50 per week and a free bus pass. In the second year of this apprenticeship role, an entrepreneurial spirit raised its head when he passed his driving test, bought a car and charged fellow players their bus fair to drive them to and from work.
With a promising career unfolding, Nathan had his eye on the top but when a knee injury took him out of the game for four months, on his return to the pitch, he was very protective of it, worried a strike would take him out of the game for good. Impatient coaches sidelined his career when he stopped tackling to avoid further injury and Nathan was relegated to the reserves. But rather than sit back and complain, with a thirst for business he enrolled on the Business Studies course at Hull College, still managing to play semi-pro for North Ferriby United, followed by Immingham and Brigg Town where he won the FA Vase at Wembley in 1996.
During his studies, Nathan also worked part-time for his father and uncle at Stead and Smith Engineering and then joined the company full-time. Business was great for many years but with all its eggs in one basket at a local food manufacturer, the company became vulnerable when main contacts retired and left the business, to be replaced with new employees who brought in their own contacts and the business folded over-night. Fortunately, the Stead family owned the premises and Nathan raised the capital to buy it back from the liquidator and Stead Engineering was born in 2014.
Nathan says:
“I knew we had to rejuvenate the business and smarten up the whole operation. So we reinvested in new machinery and equipment, new vehicles, staff training and purchased uniform for the team. I wanted to change the perception of traditional engineering firms, with dirty workshops and a fear of putting our name out there. Instead, we approached dormant clients, people we hadn’t heard from in years and told them we were back with a fresh approach. Our efforts were very successful and we immediately gained new business, it had been there all the time, we just needed to ask for it. We also continue to do lots of networking and have built up a fantastic network through BNI which is a team of marketing people, all seeking out referrals for one another and we get literally hundreds of thousands of pounds of work from it each year.”
“We have four sides to our business, usually we get an order from one section for example a new conveyor system, we get on with the client and their team and this leads to other works, such as repairs of other machines, industrial painting, supporting the business with our 24-hour call out service, maintenance and then fencing, or as we call it, ‘Precision Perimeters’. We have found our ethos; ‘The answer is yes, now what is the question?’, is what our clients want and need. They come to us to solve their problems and that’s exactly what we do. A recent example is a conveyor for a waste recycling facility on the South Bank. Other engineering firms had turned down the job as they wanted a conveyor with a mechanism that allowed a section to swing out of the way to allow for another section to move in. We looked at the job and worked with our team to make it happen.”
“We know that by making things possible for our clients, they will keep coming back and recommend us to others and this is the reason Stead Engineering has gone from strength to strength over the last three years.”
“Successful engineering consists of a number of teams, working together in sync from initial site visit and discussions, to drawings and design, pricing, build, installation and ongoing maintenance. Clients come to us with what might seem like a wild request and we find a way to produce it.”
