Greater Reading Area
I first picked up a soldering iron when I was 11 years old, and I have been involved in electronics ever since. I got my amateur radio licence when I was 14, and used to repair scrap TV’s and sell them through newspaper adverts as a self-employed schoolboy. I intended to become an electronic engineer, but ended up studying mechanical sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge because this was the nearest to a specialist electronics degree that was then offered. On graduation, I qualified as a Chartered Accountant, but still held a burning ambition to own my own business. I’ve owned Newbury Electronics for the last 30 years and have enjoyed every moment of the challenge of building it up. Having worked for 5 years as Financial Controller for AB Electronics PLC, one of whose subsidiaries was Newbury Electronics, my business partner and I were given the opportunity to buy Newbury Electronics in 1987. This was after I had a year out to take a 1 year MBA from Cranfield University. We jumped at this chance and we both immensely enjoyed managing and driving the business forward. In 1998, and the early years of the internet, we started to sell online and launched www.pcbtrain.co.uk . In 2011, I bought out my business partner on his retirement, and became sole owner. In the last 10 years, we have focussed on developing on online trading platform that allows clients to get quotes and place orders for complex electronic products and services in a simple and straightforward fashion and completely integrating this into our production process. We are not box shifters. Every product we make is unique to our clients. I thrive on the opportunity to innovate and create something worthwhile that grows because customers love it.
Started in 1956 Newbury Electronics are specialist fabricators and assemblers of printed circuit boards We offer: • Printed Circuit Boards – including multi-layer builds, controlled impedance, Blind VIA PCBs, Buried VIA PCBs • Assembly of Circuit Boards – we have an extensive plant inventory in our factory, allowing us to provide many specialist circuit board assembly options, including surface mount, a host of testing options and component kits • An online sales portal called PCB Train. • Electronic Design Development • Flexible Circuits, including flexible PCBs and flexi-rigid PCBs • Laser cut solder paste stencils • PCBs in volume • PCB CAD layouts
My brother and I part owned Cobra Automotive Products Ltd, and Cobra Supaform Ltd. We manufactured tens of thousands of custom alloy car wheels and rally car seats from a factory in Telford, Shropshire and exported them world-wide.
I qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Price Waterhouse Coopers in their Birmingham office.