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Foundry Businesses

Established businesses. Responsible new ownership.

The companies we take forward, and the terms on which we intend to own them.

Our publication standard

We do not present hypothetical investments or illustrative case studies as completed transactions.

This page will hold real companies, named with the agreement of both the outgoing owner and the new owner-steward, as transitions complete. Until then it sets out how the first will be chosen — which is the only honest thing an institution at our stage can publish.

01 — The profile

A company worth carrying forward.

A brass plaque on the wall of a long-established British works
Trading history
Long enough to have been through at least one downturn and to have come out still trading.
Size
Large enough to support a full-time owner and a management layer beneath them; small enough that one person can genuinely hold it.
Profitability
Consistent, and not dependent on one unusual year or one unusual contract.
Customer concentration
Broad enough that losing the largest customer is a difficult year rather than the end.
Geography
United Kingdom, and somewhere a steward can realistically live.
Succession position
No obvious successor inside the family or the management team.
Something that is hard to reproduce
Work that takes real skill, a licence that took years to obtain, relationships that are institutional rather than personal, or a position in a supply chain that would be difficult to build from nothing.
02 — What we screen out

What we will not take on.

Machined components on the stores shelves of a precision workshop
01
Turnarounds and distressed businesses.

We are not equipped for them.

02
Businesses that are one relationship deep.

Where the owner’s personal relationship is the business, the transfer cannot be engineered.

03
Companies whose accounts only work in a good year.

Borrowing sized against optimism transfers the risk onto the workforce.

04
Sectors where the technical risk cannot be matched by a steward.

If nobody we could realistically place could run it, we should not acquire it.

05
Anything that requires the name to change.

Where the value lies in absorbing the company into something else, a consolidator is the right buyer and we are not.

03 — Sectors of interest

Where established skill is hard to reproduce.

Sector matters less than durability, but these are the areas where succession pressure and hard-to-reproduce skill most often meet.

Precision engineering
Machining, tooling and specialist fabrication.
Specialist manufacturing
Low-volume, high-specification production.
Industrial services
Maintenance, testing, calibration and installation.
Building services
Regulated trades with long client relationships.
Technical distribution
Where product knowledge is the barrier to entry.
Business services
Recurring, relationship-led work with low churn.
04 — How we intend to own

Five commitments in practice.

An apprentice setting up a lathe under supervision
01
Preserve identity
Where the name and the way of working create the value.
02
Support the steward
Counsel and capital, without taking the decisions for them.
03
Invest in capability
Equipment, premises, training and apprenticeships.
04
Avoid disruption
No reorganisation for its own sake in the first year.
05
Maintain accountability
Honest reporting, to investors and to ourselves.

Do you own a business that could become a Foundry Business?

One conversation, in confidence, with no obligation.

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