Bolton based Double Check Digital Engineering provides steel engineering 3D modelling, structural drawing and surveys. GM Business Growth supported the company to get started and helped them secure funding to grow.
TOP 3 OUTCOMES
• Successfully applied for a Business Start-Up loan
• Gained knowledge and confidence to run his business
• Expanded his team based on this confidence
We spoke to Glyn Holland, Director, Double Check Digital Engineering.
Glyn worked in the structural drawing industry for 35 years before he set up his own firm, Double Check Digital Engineering. Although he had decades of industry experience, he’d never run a business before.
He reached out to the GM Business Growth Hub for support - as he had the idea and the product but needed support on how to further develop the business. Glyn joined the Hub’s EnterprisingYou programme, designed specifically to help those with a budding business idea or established self-employed individuals, freelancers and gig economy workers.
It was while working for the other firm that he started investigating using parametric design and development. This is where he created code that can be repeated over and again, to fast-track actions/procedures, that are done on a daily basis, such as placing the same structural piece in multiple places on a railway bridge. He did this successfully and won awards for his work, but his desire to further investigate what could be done with software in the structural design work inspired him to set up his own business.
At Double Check, Glyn has succeeded in creating a system to vastly reduce the design time of structures. Usually, what would take 6 to 8 weeks to model or design manually can now take less than 23 minutes with Glyn’s system. Glyn’s aim now is to get this technology in front of decision makers, or as they are known in the industry ‘tier one contractors’.
“What we're doing now is looking for opportunities where there is a standard design. Once we can understand how to code it, we can do it again and again very quickly and we've done it with two different types of Network Rail bridge. I now have a team of three, including me, doing this work. One is an apprentice, he has done two full years on civil engineering collage course, so he fits in well here.”
You can see a video of Glyn’s software building a standard Network Rail bridge here: (2) DCDE - Parametric U-Deck - YouTube
“What we are aiming to do with the business loan that we were helped with is to put this methodology in front of a tier one contractor. We generally work for the fabricator which is appointed by the tier one contractor, also the tier one contractor appoints a designer. The tier one contractor appoints the concrete man, etcetera.”
GM Business Growth Hub gets involved
Since working with EnterprisingYou from early 2024, Glyn improved his business confidence and was ready to grow his business.
“I'm working with members of the Growth Hub on just the basic standard business things. I'm getting my knowledge levels up. It also gives us an opportunity, when advisors say, maybe you should speak to this person or maybe you should speak to this person, to expand our network is the obvious one of the benefits.”
To help him meet his ambitions, his advisor put him in touch with Access to Finance to better understand his finance options. Having the funds will give Glyn and his team time to allow him to further develop his process and ready it to take it out to the market.
“I didn't start a business as somebody who was a business owner before. I've had to sort of learn as I'm going along. So having that kind of support has been great and now we were able to get some finance through the Business Start-up Loan.
“Getting in touch with touch with the Growth Hub allowed us to see that there were finance options out there and that was there was help from various different sources, either technically or from a business point of view.”
Glyn says that he has gained a lot from working with GM Business Growth Hub advisers and is going to continue to do so.
“Yeah, absolutely. There's no downside to it, none that I can think of.”
Do you have a product that meets a market need but need support take it further? Here at GM Business Growth Hub we can support you with one-on-one support and workshops to help you develop both your business and your idea or product. We can help you identify suitable finance options.
You can get in touch through the form below and an adviser will be in touch.
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