We buy and run family workshops — bakeries, print shops, joineries — and fit them with the automation their owners were never offered. The craft stays. The drudgery goes.
Ten-year money with no exit clock. We buy to keep, and we reinvest what the machines save.
Our engineers work the floor for the first year, shift by shift, beside the people who know the trade.
Automation sized for a forty-person shop, fitted and maintained by us and owned by the business itself.
Each business keeps its name, its people and its trade. We add the capital, the engineers and the machines — and then we stay.
A fourth-generation bakery that made nine thousand loaves a night by hand. We fitted a divider-rounder line and a proofing robot, and kept every baker.
Dough room, night shift
A litho and packaging printer that turned down big orders for lack of hands. Automated plate handling and a palletising cell doubled what one shift can ship.
Press hall, line one
Bespoke staircases and sash windows. A CNC cell now cuts the parts; the joiners assemble and finish. Lead times fell from eleven weeks to four.
Bench four, finishing
No renders, no stock showrooms. Every frame is a line we fitted and still look after — drawn first, then built.
Most owners start with a survey. Some stop there, and that is fine — the plan is theirs to keep.
£6,400
One-off, two weeks
£4,800
Per month, twelve months
By offer
For owners ready to step back
Four stages, never rushed. Each one ends with something you can keep, even if we part ways.
Every shift, every station. We learn the trade from the people who do it before we suggest a single machine.
Where does the work wait? Where do backs bend? A plain report shows the hours hidden in each step of the day.
Machines arrive in the slow season, run beside the old line for a month, and take over only when your team says so.
An engineer on call, spare parts on the shelf and training for every new starter, for as long as we own the business.
Partners who have run workshops, fixed lines at three in the morning and signed the payroll — with a bench of forty engineers behind them.
Ran a 120-person print works for eleven years, then sold it to the staff. Started Halden to do it again, with better machines.
Twenty years commissioning robot cells for car plants, then for companies a hundred times smaller. Believes the best machine is the one nobody notices.
Runs the first year inside every business we buy: rotas, training, the awkward conversations. Previously ran operations for a chain of forty bakeries.
Fifteen years buying family businesses for a pension fund that never sells. Writes the ten-year hold into every deal so nobody has to trust a promise.
They didn't sell us a robot. They stood at the mixer with us for a month, then built the machine we had been describing for ten years.
Our night shift went from nine people lifting pallets to three people running the line — and nobody lost a job.
The only investor who asked to see the loading bay before the spreadsheet. That told me everything.
Average units per shift across the workshops we run. Nobody worked longer hours to get here; the machines took the heavy part.
Anything else, ask Ada. She has sat across the kitchen table from most of the people who sold to us.
Ask a questionNo. About a third of our work is a minority stake or a paid survey. We buy outright only when an owner wants to step back.
They stay. Every deal includes a three-year no-redundancy clause, and so far nobody has needed it. Most teams grow once the heavy work is gone.
Ten years is written into every purchase. Our oldest workshop has been with us for nine, and we have not sold one yet.
Food production, print and packaging, joinery, metalwork and commercial laundries — anywhere hands do repetitive, heavy or hot work.
Yes. It takes two weeks, and the plan is yours to keep, whoever you choose to build it.
Short pieces from our engineers and the owners we work with — what broke, what worked and what we would do again.
