When their ideas fell on deaf ears, a trio of innovators jumped ship from their jobs and set up Martek Marine.
Paul Luen set up Martek Marine in 2000 with former colleagues Mike Pringle, commercial director, and marketing director Steve Coulson. The trio worked in a large company that didn’t see the potential of their ideas or nurture its staff.
Luen says: “The flipside of that was that there was a massive opportunity in the reunion of us three.”
This opportunity was a product to detect water in commercial ships carrying dry cargo. “There was the potential for legislation to require this type of equipment to be fitted into ships,” he says. “We had done some work at engineering a system at the old company so when we formed Martek this was our first research and development project.”
Martek became the first to launch and certify the product, known as Bulksafe.
“That was the start of the next phase of growth because of the level of income it brought in and the exposure it gave us to the market,” says Luen. “It opened a lot of doors and we were recognised through awards including two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise.”
Marinox, the company’s second product, which monitors ships’ emissions, was one Luen had also taken to the board of his previous employer.
“It became clear that unless a shipping company was being forced to spend money on this system, there was little advantage in them fitting this equipment,” he says.
So he kept an eye on the development of the legislation: “As I saw the required number of signatories and support was approaching, we used that as the trigger to expedite our development of it. Like Bulksafe, we wanted to be the first to the market with the product and certification.”
At the time the company’s strapline was Delivering Compliance, then Luen changed it to Innovating Beyond Compliance. “Delivering Compliance is what our products were about, but then the business went through another revolution,” he says. “To continue to grow we needed to look over and above compliance and create new markets.
“It is important for me not to be looking at tomorrow but three years ahead. It would be easy to work on a pure operational level, then in three years find we have no business.”
Exports make up 90 per cent of Martek’s £7.5m turnover and the company has a diverse range, including portable defibrillators for ships, which will become the focus in this economic climate.
The company expects to launch another medical product for ships in the third quarter of this year.
For the past 18 months Luen says he has been growing the company from adolescence to adulthood, with the board stepping away from operational decision-making. There’s also the aspiration to take the business public, but this doesn’t mean Luen plans to move on.
“I have got no intentions of going anywhere because there’s so much opportunity in the marine business and for individual divisions,” he says. “If any of the medium-term innovations come to light there are some big opportunities in £100m-plus markets. There’s a lot of doom and gloom about but I’m more excited than I have ever been about the long- term fundamentals for us.”
Also in: March 2009
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