Trevor Forster, Titan’s Managing Director, speaks to Business Focus Magazine about how his early career set him on the path to founding Titan Enterprises and the freedom it gave him to develop breakthrough flowmeter technology.
Mini turbines and flowmeters are essential measurement devices across a wide range of sectors, and Titan Enterprises continues to expand to serve them all.
“A few times we’ve been told ‘You can’t do that!’, and we’ve just done it anyway. The way we work with customers from research, development, through to production has enabled us to solve a lot of OEM application issues,” Forster recalls. “Through that process, we’ve helped customers decrease their assembly times, improve efficiency, and provide extra functionality.”
One example of Titan Enterprises’ method bearing fruit was its work for a customer manufacturing cooling systems. The third world countries the products were being exported to often had poor water quality, damaging the meters. Titan Enterprises was able to solve that by developing an ultrasonic flowmeter that could operate accurately and reliably even with contaminated water.
“Our USP is our flexibility, adaptability and ability to work with customers to understand their applications and find workable solutions,” Forster tells us. “We have a great range of standard products, but 70% of our sales are from OEM customers. Spending six months working with the customer to solve a problem to get a long-term OEM solution, gives us a stability and future where we know we’ll be manufacturing say 4,000 meters a year for the next ten years. I don’t think many companies do that.”
“Because our market is so diverse, ensuring we are promoting ourselves sufficiently across the sectors can be challenging. From companies making beer in Canada, to medical equipment in Europe and mining in South America or Africa. We also serve the offshore sector where we see a large number of our high-pressure oval gear flow meters go to oil rigs,” Forster says. “However, our wide customer and geographic base have made the last couple of years not as painful as it could have been.”
“We want to consolidate our place in the market. We have a good position and a product range we are proud of. Only one or two players globally are where we are and as far as I can tell they don’t offer the flexibility that we do,” he says. “We will look at projects and rather than try to sell anything upfront, work closely with our customers to see if we have a solution first. It means we may go down a rabbit hole or two but most of the time it works out because I won’t take on a problem unless I believe we can solve it. It means we spend a lot on Research and Development, but industry doesn’t stand still and investing in R&D is paramount to us staying ahead of the game and taking advantage of the latest technologies. Our R&D spend is 20% of our turnover where the norm is 8-10%.”
It is that extra investment and ongoing high R&D spend that will see Titan Enterprises at the vanguard of their sector for years to come.
Read the full interview here:
