CASE STUDY
How FDPack gives Nick Ford the forward view he once lost a business without
Nick Ford is the founder and design engineer at PipSqueak Developments, a business he has built over nearly 24 years, helping innovators and entrepreneurs bring new products to life. From concept through to prototype and proof of concept, Nick and his team are the people you call when you have a great idea and need the technical expertise to make it real.
Nick is exceptionally good at what he does. But PipSqueak is not his first business. And the one that came before it failed, tragically. Understanding why, and making sure it could never happen again, is the thread that runs through everything Nick does today.
And it’s the reason FDPack matters so deeply to him.
The business he couldn’t see ahead of
Before PipSqueak, Nick ran a larger engineering business. At its peak, it employed 20 people and was generating strong revenues from a series of lucrative contracts. From the outside, it looked like success. But beneath the surface, a critical vulnerability was building, one that nobody in the business could see.
“We had a series of contracts that we made fantastic money on,” Nick explains. “But we had no understanding that the goose that laid that particular golden egg was going to stop. The money was just coming in and coming in, and then the tap got turned off. We had a very large overhead. We couldn’t see into the future. We were chewing into reserves. And very quickly it became a catastrophic insolvency.”
The business didn’t fail because the work was poor. It didn’t fail because the market disappeared. It failed because nobody could see what was coming, and by the time the problem was visible, it was already too late to act.
Nick carried that lesson with him when he founded PipSqueak. He built it deliberately lean, kept overheads minimal, and maintained a strategic reserve so the business could absorb shocks. But one thing remained stubbornly out of reach: a clear, reliable view of what lay ahead.
The trap every founder falls into
Nick is refreshingly honest about the gap between being brilliant at your craft and running the business that surrounds it.
“Almost all entrepreneurial businesses are set up by people that are very competent at doing what they do, but who never dreamt they would be a business administrator,” he says. “I’m an engineer. I never imagined myself doing a lot of the things that running a business requires. We get thrown into a mixture of things we’re not really ready for.”
Finance sits at the top of that list. And, as Nick puts it: “without it, you haven’t got a business.”
Like most founders, Nick had the basics covered. A bookkeeper kept Xero up to date. The historical records were tidy. But Xero, as Nick recognised, is fundamentally backward-looking software. It tells you what happened. It has nothing to say about what’s coming.
“It’s great at recording what you’re doing and building up the history of what you’ve done,” he says. “But it’s not very good at looking forwards. It’s a bit of dumb software.”
The consequences of that blind spot played out clearly last year. PipSqueak had two very difficult quarters, followed by one exceptional one, a single period that generated almost a full year’s worth of turnover. But delivering at that intensity left no time for business development. The quarter that followed was painfully quiet.
“If we don’t have a pipeline, we’re running a business on hope,” Nick says simply. “No-one comes and finds us. No-one does.”
The noise in the engine you didn’t know was there
Nick met Spencer Smith through Startup 2 Standup, a networking group for entrepreneurial businesses. He acknowledges that many founders approach anyone from a financial background with a degree of wariness, and he was no different.
“Most of us have been burnt in one way, shape or form,” he says. “Somebody from a financial background has let us down or cost us. So, building trust is everything.”
Spencer earned that trust quickly. His first move was to look under the bonnet. Nick runs two companies and had set up Xero straight out of the box, accepting the default chart of accounts and working with it ever since. To Nick, it looked perfectly functional. To Spencer, it was quietly setting him up for problems.
“Spencer said: you’ve just implemented Xero straight out of the box and taken all their recommendations,” Nick recalls. “Well, actually there is a reason to change this. Let me restructure it and unify both companies so they’re working in the same way.”
Nick had assumed nothing was wrong. Spencer could see it wasn’t as right as it could be and that small problems, left unaddressed, have a habit of becoming expensive ones. Nick captures it in a way only an engineer would:
“It’s like driving your car and it’s working fine, but I can hear the engine making a noise,” he says. “You might be vaguely aware it’s not sounding like it used to. But I can hear that noise and go: that means this isn’t working right. And if it isn’t working right, that’s going to go from a £20 problem to a £2,000 problem very quickly. It’s not wrong, but it isn’t as right as it can be. And you’re setting yourself up for problems in the future that are easy to solve now.”
For a man who once watched a business slide into insolvency because problems weren’t caught early enough, that kind of proactive, expert attention is not a luxury. It’s exactly what he needed.
The next step, and why it matters more to Nick than most
With the foundations properly in place, the next step is to begin using FDPack’s forecasting platform, and for Nick, that step carries a weight that goes well beyond the practical.
FDPack draws on the accurate, up-to-date data from Xero to give a rolling picture of the business, not just where it has been, but where it is going. It is precisely the kind of forward-looking visibility that his previous business fatally lacked. Nick is acutely aware of that.
“FDPack is a tool to tell you whether the things you’re doing are right,” he says. “It’s not telling you how to do those things. If you’re not doing your marketing or your business development, it will tell you it’s going to be a slow car crash. It will tell you there’s a wall coming up and you’re driving into it.”
But that same honesty is what makes it so valuable. If you can see the wall coming, you have time to steer away.
“With being able to start to see into the future – what the future could look like, it means you can make actions today that change that future,” Nick says. “And it encourages you to be more honest about your business. Do I really want to go to that networking event? Well, if I don’t, how else am I going to get the new business I need for the month after, and the month after that?”
That shift – from reactive to proactive, from historical to forward-looking – is the essence of what FDPack delivers. Nick knows exactly what it means to run a business without it. He is not going to make that mistake again.
Knowledge is power – and he’s building towards it
After a turbulent year, PipSqueak has now delivered three consecutive profitable months. Nick is only at the start of his journey with FDPack, but the foundations are solid and the forecasting capability is within reach, arriving at exactly the right moment.
“We’re starting to understand that what we’ve done over the last quarter is now beginning to create growth towards the place we want to be,” he says. “Knowledge is power – and any tool that is looking beyond today, the more information that you can give it, the better.”
Looking ahead, Nick is already thinking about how to get the most from the forecasting stage, including using his CRM more rigorously, so the pipeline data feeding into FDPack is as accurate as possible. The two systems don’t integrate automatically; that discipline has to come from the founder. But that, Nick says, is part of the point.
“It’s about consistency – creating the things that, if I do them enough, actually create a pipeline,” he says. “If we don’t have a pipeline, we’re running a business on hope.”
He is equally clear about what Spencer himself has brought to this journey so far, and what he expects as they move into forecasting together.
“Spencer is competent, personable and likeable, as well as professional,” Nick says. “He has the experience. He’s been through this process and worked with small founders and larger businesses. He’s not just a critical friend, he’s a critical friend who can see things that you can’t see, and who understands the long-term implications of the problems he’s spotted.”
For a founder who once lost everything because he couldn’t see what was coming, that is not a small thing.
Low cost and low risk
FDPack is a complete solution with tools and expertise bundled into one simple package. Designed to be lean and efficient, we charge a fixed monthly fee that is significantly less than the cost and risk of the equivalent in-house recruitment of one or more senior accounting personnel.