Growth and jobs for tooling factory

A Black Country precision engineering business, built from the ashes of a family company, is taking on staff and seeing soaring levels of demand for its work writes Simon Penfold.

Cube Precision Engineering was formed early last year by Neil Clifton and his business partners following the administration of Clifton Precision, the family firm founded in the 1970s.

Like many other firms in the region, Clifton was dragged down by the sudden decline in the automotive sector. Neil Clifton's strategy for the new business was to move into new areas such as aerospace and defence work.

This has proved a success and, less than two years later, Cube has doubled its turnover and gone from employing just six people to a 28-strong workforce - and it is recruiting more people all the time.

Based in Cakemore Road, Rowley Regis, Cube specialises in tooling and precision machining.

Neil Clifton, Cube's joint managing director, said: "The old business was 99 per cent automotive, but now is split fairly evenly between automotive, aerospace and defence.

"We can't talk too much about the defence work but the aerospace contracts involve work on the Boeing 737, the landing gear for the Boeing 767 and the new Airbus A350 long-range airliner."

Expansion

Cube has just achieved the important aerospace manufacturing quality standard AS9100 Rev B and its success has seen it being specified as a tool-making supplier of choice by Boeing.

But the automotive sector is still important too. Cube is working with Honda on its new Civic and it was "significant" work from the Japanese car firm's Swindon plant that has helped underpin Cube's expansion, said Mr Clifton

"Most of our work is tooling and sub-contract machining; making precision tools, composite tools and mould tools. We work with a wide range of materials, from polyresins to cast iron.

"I come from a sales background, and we have a very sales-focused approach as a business. I don't like to use the term 'aggressive' but we are very enthusiastic about winning new business. It is why we have diversified into new fields such as aerospace and defence work.

"We can offer something that very few other companies in the UK can; we have some very niche kit. We operate 10 CNC machines and we have the capacity to machine items up to five metres wide. We have cranage that can lift 35 tonnes and we have presses up to 1,000 tonnes.

"It means there are probably only two or three other places with that range of kit in the UK to compete with."

The result has been increasing work, and a need to increase the workforce.

"When we started up in January last year we had six staff. We have now grown to 28 and need another four by the end of the month to handle the work we are expecting. We will probably need a further two or three before Christmas.

"We are now aiming to run a full night shift, so the factory will be running 24-hours a day five days a week. We already work from 6am to 4pm at weekends.

"We have been able to recruit very good, skilled people, but it is getting harder to find them. The most important thing is that they fit in well with the existing team."

The last few years have been an uncertain time for West Midlands manufacturing, but Neil Clifton and the team at Cube believe they are on the right track.

"Normally in this business you can see about eight weeks ahead in terms of work and orders," said Mr Clifton. "But at the moment we are looking at February before we have any big gap in our capacity, and we are on the verge of an order with Honda that could mean two years' of work.

"The figures tell their own story: turnover last year was £892,000 and we will more than double that this year."