Neale 00:10
Hi, I’m Neale Mighall. Welcome to Series 2 of the Another Bright Spark Podcast. Our guest today is a very, very, very special guest, and not just because he pays my wages, it is CEO, founder of Ignys, Richard Fletcher.
Richard 00:23
Hello Neale.
Neale 00:23
Hello. Right, we’ve deliberately not talked about Ignys in general, and this podcast is about that, and we’ll get into why we started it in a little bit. I was quite against doing this, but you were very adamant that it would be a really good idea, so we never even spoke about it. Why were you so adamant and why you were so passionate about doing something like this for the company?
Richard 00:47
I’m a big podcast fan. Lots of my listening, lots of my learning, lots of stuff that I don’t listen to the radio and others just try and get a benefit of using that extra time in the car or that extra time when I’m sitting down to learn something to find something out. And we’re in an area where we do part of a job for somebody. We create a widget, we create a gadget, we solve a particular problem, but I’m really conscious that that’s part of a bigger picture. It’s part of the raising finance, the selling, the understanding, the shipping that… And so as part of the ecosystem that we live in and part of our customer success and our success is getting that idea all the way through the place through to the end goal. And it’s not a way of just going Ignys, Ignys, Ignys, Ignys, Ignys, because it’s never about us. It’s about the solution. It’s about the products, it’s about the thing we’re doing. And so part of it is a give back to the community. It enables our customers. It helps us have better reach across the world as well. But it fits really nicely into a diverse set of different people that we can talk to that add something and hopefully helps people along their journey.
Neale 01:59
Was that bigger picture the vision that you have, as I say, you know, we’re engineers, we work on solutions, but I said there’s a lot more going on for a customer. Was that one of the reasons you wanted to go into business yourself?
Richard 02:10
Um, I think one of the reasons I wanted to get into business myself is I’ve worked out that I’m generally unemployable. I’ve got my I don’t have a filter very much
Neale 02:20
I know you don’t have a filter yeah yeah
Richard 02:22
So if I think something stupid I will say something stupid and that’s not overly compatible with sort of like careers.
Neale 02:29
I’m exactly the same so I used to work for an agency. I won’t say which one but you can probably scan down my LinkedIn profile and see it. I didn’t last very long mostly because I do have a filter but more tactful than you are at times. I know you don’t mind me saying that but if a client was doing something stupid I would strongly advise that it wasn’t probably the best solution for the best use of the budget. I find that really difficult.
Richard 02:54
I think there’s a way of saying that and there’s a way of guiding that, but I think when you’re internal developing something for somebody that you’re being employed directly by, there’s less rules about what you can and can’t say. And if, you know, why are we doing this? And I think I probably over challenge a little bit and care too much about the thing that we were doing. Yeah. So when I decided to set Ignys up, then I could sort of write the rules about how we do things and what we do and it’s no accident that we have polo shirts rather than shirts, because I just hate wearing shirts.
Neale 03:33
We were talking about this before. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Easier solutions.
Richard 03:36
Absolutely.
Neale 03:36
Yeah. So what was the process of setting the business up then?
Richard 03:40
So the process of setting the business up for me looked like leaving my previous place, finding a name for the company, getting a bank account set up and disappearing to Australia on holiday for about six weeks.
Neale 03:52
Not for tech reasons.
Richard 03:53
And then coming back and going okay let’s get started. So I started out effectively as a one-man band contractor but I soon realized that there’s so much demand for people needing good stuff doing in a nice coordinated way that soon my capacity was filled and I had to start employing people and growing and we’ve sort of carried on to where we are. I didn’t do a huge amount of research about what I needed to do to set the business up I’d always had a keen interest in in business with an A-level in business which doesn’t arm you for doing business whatsoever but I’d been listening to entrepreneurial type things I’d had a little bit of dabbling in property businesses and I thought how hard can it be and I’m really grateful that I didn’t know everything I needed to know in order to start because I would have never started.
Neale 04:47
Do you think that have would put you off?
Richard 04:48
Absolutely. Yeah.
Neale 04:49
Too much to deal with. We could do a step-by-step bite-sized chunks.
Richard 04:52
Well you just get yourself into trouble than out of trouble. That seems to be the process until the point you’re up and running and established.
Neale 04:58
We were saying to Mark before, it’s like, say yes to things, you know, to take the opportunities, do it. One of the things that I really like that you set up in the business is that we own our own mistakes. So if someone makes an honest mistake, they own up to it. Why is that important, especially for engineering?
Richard 05:15
I think it would be silly to assume that we don’t make mistakes. And if we spend our time and energy covering up mistakes, we’ve culturally got it wrong. I think that comes from a place of fear, a place of having to protect yourself, and you don’t do your best work in that environment. You don’t enjoy working in that environment. You’re forever worried about the thing that you’ve done rather than raising your hand and going, there’s a thing. I’ve made an error, something’s not right, because then you can get the support to fix it, address it, and move forward, rather than living in fear and wondering every day if someone’s gonna find out and catch you out.
Neale 05:53
Another thing that I quite like is that family is really important. You know, someone needs to be somewhere. It’s quite clear – you need to be there. And where was that born out of?
Richard 06:04
I think it became really clear to me, I was first setting up the business, I was working for a company over in Norfolk and so I was holed up in a golf hotel for three or four nights a week and I missed my son’s harvest festival at school and I missed his starting up of Beavers when he took his vow, why am I missing these things and why are we insisting that other people miss things that are really important, did it really matter that I was in Norfolk at that point or should I have been at home, should I have been around family. It’s sort of carried forward, you can’t move on those moments, work is a big part of your life but at the same time so is family and the rest of the things.
Neale 06:51
And you’re probably not doing your best work if you’re worrying about the effect that you’re not there and you’re gonna do a half-hearted, so it’s not gonna be in it, yeah, yeah. So, obviously we’re here. What challenges are customers currently facing? What’s going on in the big, wide world?
Richard 07:08
So I think what’s about to happen that I’m not sure many people have really addressed yet is we’re going to be back into a component obsolescence set of issues. After Covid there was a supply chain problem, everybody panicked rightly wrongly, maybe over-purchase things, but we’ve seen their customers are starting to eat through the stocks of the things they had, then because you’ve not been buying them you’re not aware of what the lead times of components are, and so I think towards the end of this year and into the start of next year as that starts to unwind, I think we’re going to be back into supply chain issues. We’ve had warnings from various distributors to say there are problems here, I think that’s a key issue.
Neale 07:56
What should people do then to nip in there, nip it in the bud?
Richard 08:00
To nip it in the bud I think review your supply chain, have a look at all of the key components that you use and take a pragmatic view. It may be that there’s a last time buy on a particular component coming up that you weren’t aware of because you’ve got a stockpile that you’ve been sitting on. Or it may be that you, they haven’t made the component obsolete, but just because of demand, you can’t get hold of it. And so I think have a look and make sure that you can cover yourself for a long enough time to redesign your product, re-approve your product or do something with it to keep yourself manufacturing. But that’s a game of cashflow and invoice terms and just being aware of what it is means you can do something about it. If you’re not aware of it, what you can find is you’ve got 90% of the products that you’ve paid for and you can’t finish it off and convert that.
Neale 08:48
It’s a little extra investment in securing the future basically.
Richard 08:50
Yeah. Awareness is great.
Neale 08:52
Yeah. So you said before that if you knew too much information back then what you’ve you know what you know now you probably wouldn’t have gone for it. If you could go back and give yourself a few words of advice what would what would that be?
Richard 09:09
I think it would be trust your gut, keep going and maybe take on less or delegate things out earlier. I was doing an 80 odd hour a week. I had a conversation with a business coach type person. I found my way onto a forum where there was a bunch of CEOs, MDs, founders all talking together during COVID. A chap who said to me, do you want some help doing this bit? We had a quick private chat and conversation. He went, no, stop. You’re not in a place to do this. Have a conversation with my business coach. And I think that saved me from a nervous breakdown. So I think working out what you’re good at, what you can get off your plate is just as important as you say, yes, earlier, I can say yes far too often. And it’s like, well, am I the right person for doing this job? Who knows more? Who’s got more capacity? Who’s more capable? How do you get their help to solve it so that you can end up trying to do it all yourself? Because you just get into that. I’ve got all this stuff to do and you can’t break out of that mindset.
Neale 10:15
There’s a, there’s a delegation sort of conundrum isn’t there? Because I’ve suffered this in teams before. I find it hard to let go a lot of things. A) because I’m a bit of a control freak. Um, I do tend to work up to the 11th hour, but I kind of like, I need that sort of pressure and deadline sort of do things, but I find delegating really hard because a lot of the time I’m like, well, I could just do it, you know? And you have this mental sort of, I think block, a lot of people do that. It’s like, well, by the time I’ve explained it and then handed it over, I could have done it myself. And actually I probably could have done it better. But if you don’t start letting that go and you don’t start trusting people. And a lot of the times when I have delegated things over, it’s like, you know what, I wouldn’t have done it as well as that, but not as well as a better criticism, I wouldn’t have done it like that, but is it worse than what I would have done? No. Is it better? Well, some of it, yeah. It’s, you know, it’s people can do the job that you can do enabled for you to enable to do more. You know, that’s it.
Richard 11:10
I try to have functional laziness, so if I’m going to do something more than a couple of times, work out how to automate it or who I can offload that to with a set of KPIs or a process or something around it, that means that that thing just happens. If it’s going to be done once, you might be quicker and better doing it yourself. But if you’re going to repeat it, then create a tool or do a thing that just means you’re not spending forever doing it.
Neale 11:35
So, um, I think it was last year, the year before, actually, we made the move to equity. Um, other people, um, most organizations run on equality. So everyone, you know, gets, gets treated the same, but when you make the move to equity, if you need something to perform better, whether that’s, you know, working from home a bit more, or whether that’s, um, you know, you’d rather work in a darker environment because you get overstimulated, we’re talking neurodiversity, that kind of thing, we made the decision to, you know what? Let’s, let’s go for it. I went through some courses, our mental health first aid, we have other mental health first aiders in the building. We have private healthcare. Why is that important that we’re looked after and accommodated as a business?
Richard 12:17
Well, there’s two main reasons. One is, there are reasons close to my personal life that made me super aware of neurodivergence and the challenges that you can unwittingly have that just make everyday life harder and the accommodations that might then help. But also if we’re employing clever people that are well paid and we expect them to do a good job, why wouldn’t we set it up so that they can thrive rather than force them to be in an environment that makes it hard work. It just doesn’t make business sense to go, you will sit here with a shirt on and the bright lights and noise. I don’t, I don’t get it.
Neale 13:01
I think people are more free to be themselves. We were doing that kind of thing unofficially anyway, and we just made it official. And I think it was the sort of place where that environment exists, because we know the team are neurospicy. You know, we know they’re all from different backgrounds, but everyone talks, is open to talk about it. You know, I’ve seen people come in into the business sort of a little bit nervous, maybe a little bit shy and insecure for various reasons, and just sort of completely open up. And it’s been really nice to see, so it’s, yeah.
Richard 13:30
But it helps people thrive, doesn’t it?
Neale 13:31
You’ve been a big advocater of us trying to incorporate AI into getting rid of mundane tasks that can free you up. Obviously we don’t use the code and rely on it, but sort of, it’s been a great time saver in lots of different ways across this business. You’re a huge advocate. I mean, we talk about AI quite a lot on this podcast because obviously it’s a big, you know, a big thing in our industry and around the world. Where do you see it going?
Richard 13:57
I think AI is taking away, as you say, the mundane tasks. I’ve got a spreadsheet that I need to reorganise or split columns or do some research. It’s becoming the search engine of choice for a lot of people. You know, it’s replacing sort of, I went Googling and chat GPT told me that I need to do these things.
Neale 14:14
Well we’ve had people contact us and say we’ve found you and you know
Richard 14:18
…which is a surprise really because we’ve not tried to do that it just happens yeah we’re just that good yeah and so will it be doing the solving of critical problems identifying problems I doubt it but I think where it’s at the moment it’s certainly a really helpful copilot in certain situations and it’s really dangerous and stupid in others as an experimental…
Richard 14:40
A literal copilot that you probably don’t want in the plane.
Richard 14:43
No, probably not. I got it to write, to try to write some code for a prototype development that I was doing on the side for a thing that we have an idea for yeah and it talked a really good game it talked through the this is what we’re doing and this is how it’s going to be and then when you dig into the code you find out it’s done none of that whatsoever and it’s just put a comment in to go your code goes here so I think there’s a bunch of, people expect it to take over the world mm-hmm I think it’ll just help us become more efficient there’s another elephant in the room that it burns a hell of a lot of power and so where the trade-off sits between using it productively to be more efficient and how much energy we’re consuming and destroying the planet environment I think it’s a real delicate balance that we haven’t yet solved I was chatting to someone the other day and there’s two schools of thought around AI whether you should say please and thank you one of which thinks that please and thank you is so when the robots come well they won’t come and kill you but the other way you’ve said please and thank you that extra processing yeah that I’ve had a process so I need to eliminate yeah and so I’m not sure which of them more dangerous
Neale 15:50
Well, it’s more, it’s more, it is more power isn’t it, because it’s the process, the extra words. So you should be rude, really.
Richard 15:57
So let’s be rude to AI.
Neale 15:59
That’s the key takeaway. Excellent. Well, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you very much for this.
Richard 16:04
Thank you.
Neale 16:14
Hi, and welcome back to our first episode of our series two Premiere. We just were speaking to Richard Fletcher, CEO of Ignys. I now welcome into the studio, Neil Carter, Director of Special Projects.
Neil 16:26
Hi.
Neale 16:27
How are you doing?
Neil 16:28
I’m good.
Neale 16:28
I was just saying to Richard, I was really against doing this. My function in the business is marketing. So LeadGen, the biggest KPI, key performance indicator that I have is how many inquiries that we get. You don’t bring inquiries in, you know, obviously it’s, it’s my responsibility. I was adamant that this podcast wouldn’t do that, certainly unless it became very big and I knew I would end up hosting it. So I was against it for a few reasons. Richard was very keen to do it and so were you. Why, what was your enthusiasm behind it?
Neil 17:05
So I guess. The industry is not known for doing things that are different and I felt that doing the podcast would be a differentiator. It would stand us apart from somebody else and a lot of people would struggle to pull it off so that’s why I felt we could do something interesting, not make it overtly sales like a lot of our competitors do.
Neale 17:35
And that’s important we didn’t want it to be a sales pitch that’s why we’ve left it so long to talk to you and Richard because we thought at least leave it a year before we talk about ourselves as an organisation yeah exactly okay um you talk about doing things differently um you were Acting MD for a couple years here at Ignys uh we did a lot of things differently we gave away Lego, we did fun videos. Your route into industry as well hasn’t been the standard. What was your introduction to electronics and how did you get here?
Neil 18:06
So I actually got introduced to electronics at school. I was fortunate enough to go to school in Kettering that was world famous for satellite tracking. So that got me exposure to computers very early, Commodore PETs before anybody had heard of them. But it also got me involved in amateur radio, modifying electronics for listening to Russians in space. And that’s how I got into electronics. Yeah.
Neale 18:45
Sounds like a very exciting time when you’re that age and you’re interested in that. Was it more readily available than it is now? Or I know you’ve talked about like kits and things that you had growing up.
Neil 18:55
So, certainly computers weren’t available and the Commodore PET we had was the only one probably in the town and getting to play with that. And electronics was very different, it was much more hands-on, much more real I think than the electronics now, which is all microprocessor and surface mount. We were building this stuff, we were modifying stuff, we wanted components, we would strip the components out of other equipment.
Neale 19:30
We were just at the National Museum of Computing. We’ve got an episode coming up with Jacqui Garrad, you don’t wanna miss it. And we were saying, she was saying that occasionally when the internet goes down, a lot of people turn around and they go, the internet’s down here. And she’s like, most of our systems don’t run on the internet, it wasn’t around, it wasn’t needed. And there’s a lot of equipment there, it is very hands-on. Do you think we’ve lost something, in the tactileness of the electronics?
Neil 20:02
Yes I think we have and certainly with computers that’s the case. I mean now computers are all desktops or laptops are all fundamentally PCs. I’m from the vintage I guess where when somebody brought a new computer out it was completely different and people were trying to work out new ways of doing stuff.
Neale 20:27
It’s almost like a new operating system for every type of device.
Neil 20:31
Yeah, I mean, if you look back to my early days of electronics and computing, because you couldn’t separate them. You know, my first computer you built as electronic components before you can even do anything with absolutely. But if you look back at sort of like the Nascom vintage, the UK 101, Sinclair coming out with its Mark 14’s, ZX80, you know, moving into the Spectrum, they were all different. They were all unique. They were all what you aspire to.
Neale 21:07
You mentioned the Spectrum and the big rubber keys it’s it’s a device that’s close to our heart. How happy were you when you found out that Ignys was involved in the Spectrum ZX Next?
Neil 21:20
Yeah, I mean, the Spectrum is something I mean, as you know, I’ve got a quite a significant collection of Sinclair machines.
Neale 21:29
You have a very significant collection. Yeah, so I’ve seen the collection.
Neil 21:33
I have every model of Sinclair machine they ever made and a few of the ones that Alan Sugar made as Sinclair but yeah working with Henrique on the Spectrum Next and then the next you know the latest campaign he’s doing it’s just great it’s it’s really good but also getting back to real computers getting people interested in what we were interested in as youngsters is great so sort of being able to share that with my my grandson it is really enjoyable.
Neale 22:13
Well, it’s special to you, but I think also it’s important, isn’t it? We’ve talked about engineers, young engineers coming to the industry and being told not to use AI and to learn sort of like code properly. It’s the same as going back to basics. If you don’t know how the fundamentals are made, or sorry, if you, let me rephrase that. If you know how the fundamentals are made, you know, if you know early code, if you know the hardware electronics, surely you have a better understanding of how things are now.
Neil 22:41
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I’ve worked a lot in software with a lot of software developers, and it sort of amazes me that I can translate between binary hex and decimal in my head. You know, when I first programmed, we did it on a piece of paper with a Zak’s book, and we would hand code opcodes. And, you know, I still remember some of those codes there, somehow embedded in my brain, but you know, I can look at ASCII codes and recognize what they are where developers nowadays struggle with that in the wider context. We’re lucky here that a lot of our developers are firmware based, so they do tend to be much closer to the hardware. But yeah, it’s certainly a problem in the industry.
Neale 23:36
I said, we’ve not talked about our organization much on the podcast because it’s not a sales pitch, but I’ve talked to Richard a bit about our culture from our customer’s perspective. Why do you think they come to us? What do we do that other organizations don’t?
Neil 23:52
I think we are fairly unique in that we are of a size that we’re able to scale for people. We’re not a one-man band like a lot of organizations but equally we’re not a massive organization that has lost interest in what we do. So we’re passionate about things, we’re good at what we do, we have good people, we’re interested and as a company we’re full of people that are excelling at what we do, whether that’s in work or outside.
Neale 24:31
Yeah, everyone’s got a different passion outside of work. That’s what I find really interesting. So obviously you’re a huge archery fan. You play, you coach, you have open days to try days, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re a big part of your own club. We’ve got, um, I’m just trying to think of a single person who works in the organization. Now we’ve got other archer, we’ve got Olympic paddle boarders, you know, we’ve got people with passions outside of work. And I think they bring that in. We’re all very neurospicy and get excited about thing. And I think that comes across the customers. And as you say, we’re sort of big enough to deliver, but small enough to still care and get excited about projects.
Neil 25:10
We’re interesting to work with you know people understand our alter egos people ring us up and refer to us by the names that some on the website yeah of course yeah I don’t know who made those names no I personally would sack him yeah but people know who we are from our website you know our customers know that I shoot and make long bows you know we’re not hidden away
Neale 25:39
And we’re encouraged to be ourselves as well. We come in and talk about it. Tom was so happy. We’ve got obviously an office WhatsApp group and about his achievement on the hill climb (Lakeland Trails) and everyone was, you know, a hundred per cent behind him.
Neil 25:52
Yeah, so that that’s what makes us different. And that’s what makes us interesting to work with.
Neale 26:00
I think as well, that, that thing that makes us interested in our passions. We talk about sort of T-shaped engineers, don’t we? So everyone in the organization, apart from me is highly technical and knows kind of a little bit about everything, but then you have specialists who deep dive into specialism so we can, you know, choose them to go, okay, this is a project designed for Andy or Jason or Alasdair, yeah. Why is that important to an organization?
Neil 26:30
Well, we are always on what’s often known as the bleeding edge of technology. So not everybody can know about everything that we do. Customers come in with projects that are so out there that you can’t always have somebody that knows about it. But as long as we’ve got that general skill, invariably we can find somebody that can apply another deep knowledge into that project. And that’s where we’re really fortunate because of the way that we recruit, the way that we operate.
Neale 27:08
So you’re Director of Special Projects, we’ve got a lot of special projects coming up that we can’t really talk about on this, but they are very exciting. In general though, the next couple years, Richard’s a big advocate of AI. I asked him earlier where he sees that going, we talked about how he’s using it in the business. For you, what’s coming up over the next couple years, that is really going to have a big impact, you think?
Neil 27:30
So I think, I think when people start to really understand AI, they’ll find it’s a game changer. At the moment, people are using AI like Google. And that’s not really the point. AI is a tool. And it can simplify a lot of what you do. But it’s no different from, for example, word processing. I mean, I saw a copy of a letter that Apple sent out in the 80s, basically banning the use of a typewriter in their organization. Everyone should be using it. And what they were saying is that, you know, we’ve got devices now that are word processors, we’ve got printers. Again, back in the 80s, things were very, very different. You know, why, why would we be using typewriters when we’re trying to sell this to our customers? I think the same applies with AI. It’s a tool that people will start to use. It will simplify what we do. It will mean we can do more with less. It will just change, change the workplace. But not, not in a bad way.
Neale 28:46
Nothing to be afraid of.
Neil 28:48
No, absolutely.
Neale 28:49
Excellent. Neil, thank you so much for your time.
Neil 28:51
Pleasure.