A West Cumbrian firm is celebrating its 10th anniversary – and is continuing to innovate.
Responsive was set up by Lee Grears and has bases in Cumbria and Manchester.
It operates across the UK, and provides testing, welding, and painting inspection services to sectors including nuclear, marine, petrochemical, engineering and construction industries.
The company also provides destructive and non-destructive testing, mechanical testing and material analysis.
Lee thrives on fast-paced activity which explains why he has set up a series of start-ups in his first 10 years in business.
“I really enjoy everything associated with a start-up and setting up a new business. It’s the entrepreneur side in me.
“From the creativity of the blue sky thinking to the challenge of getting everything done at pace, it’s what I enjoy most about business.
“You have got to act fast, be able to adapt quickly, and you have to throw everything at it to make it work,” said Lee.
Responsive’s latest start-up – Flawed Ltd – was born out of the COVID pandemic when Lee felt he needed to add a pioneering product to his business portfolio.
“At the start of the pandemic we wanted to be able to offer products as well as services, to give us that extra diversity and resilience at a time when there was less call on the services side of the business,” he said.
To train their teams and to prove that testing works, industries need to use products which have defects built into them.
“Non-destructive testing operatives need to renew their qualifications every five years. They need products to work on which have known defects,” said Lee.
Flawed was born. And one side of its business which has already developed is its ability to manufacture products to help replicate scenarios on sensitive industrial sites – such as at Sellafield or in marine environments for the oil and gas industry – and to test them in a non-hazardous environment, to save time, money, and reduce risk to people when ultimately tested on site.
Responsive is made up of six different businesses: Responsive Ltd, Responsive Non Destructive Testing Ltd, Responsive Mechanical Testing Ltd, Responsive Training Services Ltd, Responsive (Manchester) Ltd, and Flawed.
But Lee has no intention of stopping there. The company’s 10th anniversary this month could well be the milestone which marks Responsive’s further expansion.
Increasing its range of work in the renewables sector to support the UK’s move to Net Zero is a clear ambition for Lee and Responsive.
And given the success of Responsive’s Manchester operation, Lee is already looking at other areas of the UK where Responsive could set up operations to support sectors in those areas.
“We are always looking for the right opportunity looking to extend our footprint and considering different geographies and different markets where our services are most in demand.
“We have got the model and we have shown that it works really well, so why not replicate it in different parts of the UK?”
