Celebrating our 40th anniversary this year

We’re thrilled to be celebrating our 40th anniversary this year and have been taking a look back at how far BEC has come since 1978.

Apart from the pop charts, where Rod Stewart was asking ‘do ya think I’m sexy?’ 1978 brought the advent of the fertility revolution with the birth of the world’s first IVF baby.  In the same year three engineers, visionaries (and musketeers!), Graham Blake, Geoff Elvy and Barry Cox got together and decided that by combining design, tooling and production under one roof they could offer a set of services that would complement one another so customers would get better, more efficient manufacturing results on home turf.

BEC have been servicing a wide range of sectors ever since, expanding year on year due to client demand with investment in great staff, state of the art technology and CRM processes to ensure we exceed every client’s expectation. Even 3D printing the first ever tool in 2015!

We’ve weathered a few storms though, sadly commemorating the passing of Barry Cox in 1991 and getting through a few recessions.  The most recent and worst being the great recession of 2007-2009.  Orders began to dry up and we watched many competitors fall by the wayside.  Mark explains “for nearly 3 years we hunkered down and rode out the storm, our only goal to keep every one of our 21 staff employed, which I’m proud to say we achieved.”

Because we were able to keep going the recession actually brought with it opportunity, the competition reduced so we picked up lots of orders.  Things gradually started improving, when in 2010 Graham Blake sold out and Mark took over Commercial Sales and Marketing.

“We’re a team of 25 now, but 7 of our staff have been with us for over 20 years which is testament to our strong work ethic and the fact we look after one another.  Our longest serving staff member has been with us for 28 years!”

Our 40 years’ experience and technical knowledge has given us the confidence to be flexible and fairly relaxed in our attitude – we’re not afraid to ask questions, relish a challenge and often have to work around things to find a solution.

Fiercely British, we source what we can through home grown channels and are very often the supplier of choice for customers from automotive, marine, FMCG, OEM and leisure industries worldwide.

To mark our 40th anniversary we’re really excited to be launching a brand new website which is informative, easy to navigate and will be regularly updated with news and exciting projects the team have been working on.