company profile Hiden Analytical
It appeared that this trim, down-to-earth entrepreneur had found the perfect match in a former colleague who had wanted him to start a company. But this engineer didn’t have the courage to leave his current employer, so Neale spent six more months searching for the right person. This turned out to be another engineer that he had worked with in the past, John Smith. The duo founded Hiden in 1982, in a lock-up garage on the south side of Warrington, a town with industrial roots that is nestled between Liverpool and Manchester. Within a few months they recruited their first employee, Tom Russell, a software engineer they both knew. Russell went on to become a director and has made key contributions to the company’s long-term success.
Getting going
A recession gripped the UK in the early 1980s, with unemployment exceeding ten percent and double- digit inflation driving up the cost of borrowing. To raise the capital required to get his start-up off the ground, Neale had to dip into his own pockets. But he also accessed up to three-quarters of the cash that he needed by tapping into a government-backed bank loan from the Small Firm Loan Guarantee Scheme. This had to be paid back within six years.
The financing helped the fledgling firm to build its first RGA. The founders had no intention of building it from scratch, because that approach makes no sense – the right way to do it is to source the various components from good suppliers, and
assemble them together on site. Neale had worked with many of these suppliers in the 1970s, and rather fortuitously, he reacquainted himself with quite a few of them in the run up to the launch of Hiden, when he found a couple of months of temporary work in this industry.
Hiden’s first product did not offer a superior technical performance to those already on the market. Instead, it appealed to customers by excelling in an area that it not supposed to matter to scientists and engineers. Hiden’s first RGA had more ‘sex appeal’ than its rivals, thanks to a higher feature count and greater ease of use.
To win sales of their first product, Neale would set off at the crack of dawn and travel up and down the length and breadth of the UK to meet potential customers. Back then Britain was a major chipmaker: National Semiconductor, IBM and Motorola (now Freescale) had a significant presence in southern Scotland; British Telecom had a major InP-based research laboratory in East Anglia; GaAs transistors were being developed and produced at the Plessey-owned Caswell site; and several other firms around the UK, both large and small, were making semiconductor devices.
Hiden launched its DSMS system in 1984
In many industries, customers can be reluctant to switch from an established supplier to a smaller start-up, fearing that they may never deliver the product, it may break down, and if the company folds, after-sales service could disappear. But Neale found that many potential customers did not worry about such matters, while some welcomed the opportunity to support the underdog.
In 1999 Hiden broadened its portfolio with the launch of secondary ion mass spectrometers. An example of this range of products is shown on the left
The quadrupole element used to build Hiden’s first RGA, which initially retailed for about £4,000
October 2012
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