Festive Focus: Meet the founder and MD behind Darlington's Ardmore Craig

For today’s North East edition of our Festive Focus series, we have Andy Stevenson of Ardmore Craig.

Can you introduce yourself and your business to our readers?

“I’m Andy Stevenson, founder and managing director at Ardmore Craig Ltd, an engineering design and consultancy company specialising in bespoke equipment and engineering solutions in the offshore oil and gas renewables and heavy industry.

“Our clients range from oil majors and offshore contractors through to cable manufactures and local fabricators around the North East of England.

“We undertake a wide range of services from concept design, through to calculation and analysis and production of manufacturing drawings along with project engineering, site surveys, etc.”

What was your company’s biggest achievement of the year?

“Our biggest achievement was an increase in staff numbers which resulted in a move to larger premises in Darlington in September this year.

“With four times the space to fill we are continuing to drive business growth, with further engineers joining the team in January and February.

“We have also agreed a sponsorship and engineering support package with Mica McNeill, the British Bobsleigh star, which is exciting and something completely different for our engineering team to get involved with.

How would you approach 2018 differently, given the chance?

“Hindsight is always great…

“Given the chance, we would have started our scale up drive earlier in the year, committing to new offices ahead of the summer which would have allowed us to increase the size of our team sooner and provided us some extra capacity earlier in the year.”

What are your company’s plans for the new year?

“We are hoping to continue scaling up, with our team size due to grow over the coming months.

“We are formally launching a range of new design services as we look to broaden the sectors we support and undertake a range of challenging engineering projects which we look forward to sharing details of in the new year!”

What are your plans for the festive season?

“Our team will have our usual ‘Christmas jolly’, starting with a bit of competition within our engineering teams via an Escape Room challenge, followed by food and drinks around Darlington.

“The team works hard all year so we always close the office over the Christmas break opening up again in the new year, which gives everyone (myself included) a well-deserved rest ready for a busy year ahead.”