Frank Madden is a founder and director of Crest Solutions, a provider of machine vision inspection and track and trace solutions to packaging and manufacturing sites.
The company enables clients to improve the way they do business through the introduction of visual inspection systems, automation, product traceability and line management software suites.
Madden is a graduate of both the Cork and Sligo Institutes of Technology where he studied electronic engineering.
Prior to founding Crest Solutions, he played an integral role in the team responsible for manufacturing at Apple computers in Ireland.
He also worked in an engineering and manufacturing capacity at Concurrent and Alps Electric.
An expert in the field of vision engineering, he founded Crest Solutions in 1998.
Headquartered in Cork, the company’s clients include Novartis, PepsiCo, Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Heineken, Glanbia and Yves Rocher.
The company has experienced accelerated growth, which has seen the number of employees double to nearly 100, between April 2014 and April 2015.
What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start up in business? Redundancy. I was working in operations management for Apple computers when they closed their printed circuit board manufacturing facility.
I took that as the opportunity I had always wanted to set up and build a business.
What moment/deal would you cite as the "game changer" or turning point for the company? There have been many. At the beginning the deals we won were through previous colleagues who had left Apple. They knew us and were willing to take a punt on us.
In 2012 we took in investment for the first time, this was another game changer as it allowed us to do things that normal trading cash flow would not allow. It was like rocket fuel – we could grow quicker with less risk.
What was your biggest business mistake? I sold all my Apple shares in 1998 to set up the business! Really though, I have made a lot of mistakes.
The most costly has been taking an engineer’s approach to R&D which saw us spend money on a hunch and a narrow market segment rather than properly assessing the entire market first.
We now have the processes in place to be more measured and deliberate in this area.
To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your plans? Over half is traded internationally. We purchased 50 per cent of a Belgian company called VistaLink and through them we have set up a further office in Sweden.
We also set up Crest Solutions UK last year and this site has the potential to be bigger than the Irish office in a number of years.
What were the best and the worst pieces of advice you received when starting out? There was plenty of bad advice around when we started out, it was 1998 and at the height of the dotcom madness.
All the advice at the time for software start-ups like us was about getting grants, getting an investor, getting great marketing – none was about getting customers.
The best advice given to me at the beginning was to do more than you are paid for, take responsibility and finish every job regardless of the cost, if you do you will always find and keep customers.
