An award-winning business support organisation is starting a conversation about what companies in the region need to help them grow.
just ten months ago by CEO Shak Asghar, has positioned itself at the heart of the Northern business community, helping to attract more than £20m to businesses in the region, creating 1,000 jobs and counting.
This positioning was cemented after the fledging firm won two Tees Business Awards last month, being named as both best new business and best new services business.
Despite this soaring success, Shak says Nudl’s journey has been a steep learning curve since launching in March.
“I created Nudl with the idea of putting the fun into funding,” he says. “And while that’s still the case, we’ve also been learning a lot about the types of support businesses in the region need, beyond cold hard cash.
“The original plan was all about working with firms to help them access the funding they needed – and were entitled to – to help them grow, but along the way our role has naturally expanded and diversified – which is great.
“While helping local businesspeople with grants and funding is still a key part of what we do, we’re also able to support them with consultancy, investment decks, in-depth financial planning and cashflow forecasting.”
That’s because, as Shak is keen to point out, being good in your field doesn’t necessarily translate into being good at business with a capital B. “We work with a lot of clients who are amazing at what they do but have limited knowledge or experience of things like funding, networking or scaling up,” he says. “That’s where we can help, above and beyond helping them identify funding opportunities; we can actually work with them to use that funding in the best way too.
“I’ve been working in this landscape for 20 years so it’s really rewarding to be able to put all those years of experience to good use, because benefitting local businesses benefits everyone in the community.”
Sharing the benefits
The real beauty of the work Nudl does is how far-reaching it can be.
One such example is when it comes to the supply chain; with Nudl’s clients looking to use their funding to buy goods or services, more often than not the money stays in the local economy.
Shak adds: “There’s so much good work going on in the North East and our activity helps businesses on their growth journey or helps them explore what their growth plans are.
“But beyond that, our impact is not just on the businesses we work with through direct funding, it’s also indirectly through the supply chain.
“Even though our client might come to us and say, ‘I need funding to buy X’, it has a knock-on impact in the supply chain when they make the purchase because, wherever possible, we refer them to local businesses for the products and services they are looking for.”
And the support goes two ways, for while Shak’s extensive knowledge of the Northern business landscape means he always knows the right person for the job, firms throughout the supply chain are returning the favour.
“What we find,” he says, “is that, all along the chain, people are referring potential clients to Nudl, because they know we can help them ‘get funded’ in order to do business with them.
“We like to say that we’ve created between 800 and 1,000 jobs since launching in March, but, to be honest, I think that’s a fairly low estimate because of the business growth within the supply chain as well.
“Purely in terms of the funding we’ve been able to access for our clients, we believe we’ve created that many jobs, but who knows how many more jobs are behind that, because in the supply chain, there has been an impact there as well.
“I think that’s so great and it demonstrates why grant funding schemes are great for the local economy and the wider economy, improving prosperity across the region.”
Success stories
Despite being less than a year old, Nudl already has some key successes under its belt, showcasing the innovative approach of so many Tees Valley businesses. One such example is Foley’s Equestrian, a Redcar-based firm that uses carpet from cutoffs at car factories and recycles it into horse surfaces such as arenas, menages and gallops. Earlier this year, the firm, which was set up in early 2020, won funding worth nearly £50,000 to refurbish a former schoolhouse in Warrenby, Redcar, transforming it into a purpose-built processing site.
At the time, company director Keith Rutherford said: “Larger premises means we can significantly increase our production, which in turn means we can continue to grow the business and take on more staff.
“Now we have more capacity to process more material, we aim to be the best supplier of quality automotive fibres across Europe.”
Shak adds: “This is what Nudl is all about, and what I’m most proud of. Yes, it’s about the funding, but it’s also about what that funding will do and the potential it helps businesses to fulfil.
“And while we work in totally different industries, the Foley’s team are just like Nudl; passionate about the region and with some big plans ahead of them.”
Looking to the future
So what’s next for Nudl?
Recent developments have a green theme, including consulting with an Irish company that is developing a training package over the course of a year teaching people to be electric bike engineers.
At the R&D stage, Shak and the team are also consulting on a project involving a concrete product developed using a new process which will produce 80 per cent less CO2 emissions per kilo, and a paint company developing a product for the outside of buildings that reduces the internal temperature by 10 degrees. Shak adds: “The past ten months have been a whirlwind and we’re not taking our foot off the gas yet.
“We have regular discussions with contacts in the United States, Middle East, Europe – we have conversations going on all over. We are working with strategic consultancy, funding and some of those we are working to bring to the region. “The North East is my home and I’m committed to helping it be the best it can be. We have some brilliant businesses here and real innovation, so the absolute highlight of my job is supporting these businesses to become major players.” And with results like this and Shak at the helm, Nudl itself is set to lead the field.
