YEAR one at Caledyne was described as “OK”, with a “slight loss” recorded.
Year two saw sales start to kick in and revenues doubled, but there was a big loss because of the amount of money pumped into product development.
Year three generated Caledyne’s first profit, and that made a big difference.
The company is now in year four, has got on to “most oil companies’ approved vendors lists”, products are now out worldwide and the projection is that revenues will come in at about £2.5million. Van Dort is reckoning on £7million for year five, which kicks off in Q3. But how is such a big jump possible?
“What we’ve seen is that, initially, when people hear about you, if you’re lucky, they might give you a little chance and you get a snippet of work to do,” he said.
“But once you get beyond three years, and I see it very clearly, people are starting to think that you might stick around and not simply die away. If you can survive three years, you’re obviously going to be around a bit longer. Then you start to grow and people begin to recognise the brand. Then you can show people that you have a track record.
“And when you qualify for multiple wells and contracts, that makes a tremendous difference. Once you have that, you can immediately invest in people, products, stock. And it just grows from there.”
“We started with four people. There are 14 now. It will probably be about 20 by the end of this year … all engineers.
“We’re having quite a lot of success right now working for service companies. That’s allowing us to remain small, focused and fast.
We’re also happy to put our products out through other service companies rather than try to get long-term contracts with big oil companies. The approach is different.”
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