City engineer transforms his prospects

By Richard Tyler 728PM GMT thirteen March 2010

It competence not receptive to advice a in advance move but, after some-more than a decade of the brightest engineering bent dispensing with their trebuchet play and streamer off to the City, the 33 year-old"s preference to have the lapse tour (and not finish up wearing a downy hat utilizing an organic catering commercial operation in farming Dorset) is something of a revelation.

Mr Curran did his time, similar to majority of his peers, operative initial at HSBC"s investment bank and afterwards fasten the authorised contention as a obvious attorney. But when he was offering the possibility to run a commercial operation in Stroud set up by a family friend, Colin Day, he jumped at the chance.

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"I have got what I cruise to be the majority appropriate pursuit in the world," he says. "Unfortunately engineering is not really well paid unless you can get your own commercial operation and grow it. Banks still compensate really well and a lot of my peers did get to be government consultants and bankers."

And it"s not usually any old engineering firm. There"s really small douse concerned at HiMag Solutions Limited. It has usually won a inhabitant foe run by Shell to await the majority earnest rising low CO companies.

HiMag designs and manufactures bespoke electrical transformers. Instead of copper coils, the organisation has grown a approach of utilizing plates of copper to do the same job, but better.Not usually are the bespoke transformers not as big and lighter than normal units, used in all from LED lights to hybrid electric car batteries, they are additionally some-more appetite efficient.

This all equates to that solar row companies, for instance, can implement the compulsory electric wires inside of their panels on people"s roofs, rather than carrying to leave dangerous high voltage electric wires in the attic.

Sales this year are issuing in, with one solar energy manufacturer augmenting the sequence from 1,000 units a month to 10,000 a month from October. The association additionally has over 50 pattern projects on the go, giving Curran certainty that sales subsequent year will be even better.

"It"s been a prolonged tough highway to get here but in the last couple of months we have incited the corner," he says. "This year I design turnover to be �900,000 and we already have �650,000 requisitioned in Jan and February. We are forecasting �2.6m sales subsequent year."

To assistance account this enlargement he is additionally deliberating new financing with multiform in isolation "angel" investors. "There seems to be income out there for the right kind of applications," he says.

The income is to be used to make firm the company"s government team. "We are at the theatre where we have fifteen staff but the government group is you do a small bit of everything. I need to get a little some-more imagination in," Curran says. "I wish a veteran prolongation engineer." It seems British engineers are behind in demand.