How Crux Product Design are growing their business in the West of England

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"I'm James West, one of the cofounders of Crux Product Design, a product design consultancy based in Bristol. We primarily serve two sectors; the pharmaceutical industry, developing drug delivery devices that might be aspirin healers insulin injecting pens; and the fast-moving consumer goods industry, which might be things like children's personal care effects.

Crux offers a full end-to-end service, taking a design concept from blank sheet of paper, to simulated product tests, all the way through to a commercially viable, production-ready design, to go into the market.

We're just coming up to 40 staff. We bring people in from an internship level, through to graduates, through to people who maybe have a number of years working elsewhere.

Our relationship with Business West started through the management team looking for support initiatives to invest in growing our skills and capabilities amongst the team.

The support from Business West and the European Regional Development Fund as part of the Enterprising West of England Programme has been around sales training and leadership training. We received a £2,000 Scale Up Coaching Grant for leadership coaching, and we've been developing our in-house teams to take us forward with a new growth strategy. We've identified people here in the organisation who are going to be the future leaders at Crux, and we need those individuals to be able to support the incoming staff base to fuel our growth.

The Business West team have given us excellent guidance, their correspondence has been great, and they've enabled us to get the grants in a stress-free easy manner. I know when we first set up 15 years ago we looked into various grants and things and the effort required to get funding was more than the effort just getting out and getting some business. Working with Business West is a much easier way to get these grants and fast-track our growth. 

I think that getting the funding has helped create a mindset shift within the organization, namely that training, especially leadership training, really makes a difference to our day to day job how we operate as a business, and that's just time to snowball and we're doing more and more of this.

I’d happily recommend Business West. The team are very approachable and the grants we've received have genuinely transformed the way we are doing business."

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