A North Wales franchise of the largest touchless disinfectant business in the UK launches successfully with help from Business Wales.
After 36 years at Airbus, Dominic Tyson decided to reap the rewards of finally being his own boss and took the plunge into starting his own business. With start-up support from the Welsh Government’s Business Wales service, Sanondaf North Wales started trading in February 2021.
- Successfully started a new business.
- Created 2 jobs.
- Adopted HR and environmental policies to help with the future sustainability and growth of the business.
Introduction to business
Started by Dominic Tyson and business partner Graham Matthews, Sanondaf North Wales is part of the largest specialist touchless disinfection company in the UK. The business provides disinfectant systems that kill 99.99% of viruses, bacteria and germs safely, without smell or health hazards to humans, animals or plant life, using electrostatic sprayers and fogging machines, developed in-house.
Here is what Dominic had to share about his journey from Airbus to being his own boss.
Why did you decide to set up your own business?
I first made contact with Business Wales and my adviser Sian Jones in September 2019 as I was thinking about setting up my own business. I have been employed by Airbus (formerly British Aerospace and BAe Systems) for 36 years and decided that I wanted to challenge (and prove) myself with running my own company for the remainder of my working career.
I attended the “Starting and Running a Business – Taking the Plunge” workshop, which Sian facilitated, and it fuelled my desire to be my own boss even further.
Although I had a great deal of business experience, I realised I knew very little about setting up and running a small company and I therefore decided that buying a franchise was the best and quickest (and safest) way for me to achieve this goal. I say ‘safest’ because I was interested in buying into a well-established brand and have the back-up support to guide me through the early stages. This is what also drew me to Business Wales.
I needed to learn quickly the fundamentals of running a business such as tax and bookkeeping, marketing and company structure, i.e. sole trader vs limited company.
I finally settled on the Sanondaf franchise because the “touch-less disinfection services” they provided and the fact that they developed their own machines and equipment appealed to my engineering bias and background. Bearing in mind this was pre Covid-19, so this was soon to become more relevant to what was about to happen.
I spent the next few months researching the Sanondaf business model to try to understand the market potential within North Wales and what finances I needed to put in place.
Obviously, the start of 2020 was completely dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and my focus for the first few months was solely on protecting my family and myself.
In March 2020, Airbus was going through some real financial difficulties due to the cancellation of a number of large orders and the lack of air travel demand. It then offered all the employees the opportunity to take Voluntary Redundancy. This was therefore the perfect opportunity to take the plunge, so I signed up immediately.
For a number of reasons, the redundancy process was a long drawn out affair, so I used this time to make contact with Sanondaf and create my business plan.
I was finally released by Airbus at the end of January 2021 and the first week of February, I was at Sanondaf Headquarters in Glasgow undergoing intense training with my business partner Graham Matthews.
We started trading as Sanondaf North Wales in February and I would like to make a special mention to Lydia Swinton from Options Autism Kinsale for being our first customer, having confidence in us and giving us the opportunity to get started on our new business venture within North Wales.
Since then, we have attended a number of Superfast Business Wales digital marketing courses and are looking forward to further support in this area, as this is where I need the most guidance!
Business Wales support
- Successfully started a new business.
- Created 2 jobs.
- Adopted HR and environmental policies to help with the future sustainability and growth of the business.
With Sian’s help, we quickly set about enrolling on all the courses she recommended from our discussions and developing a strategy that would benefit me the most. I have to say that the support was appreciated so much!
We have since had many follow-up meetings to review progress and develop the next steps. Sian was always very supportive and regularly offered advice and guidance on who to contact if I needed specific information. She kept me focussed on the immediate and most important actions I needed to work on.
Future plans and ambitions
I can’t thank Business Wales, Superfast Business Wales and specifically Sian Jones enough for all the free help and advice I have been given throughout my business start-up journey. I don’t think I could have done it without this support and it is the main reason why the whole process has been pain and stress free for me.
I hope that we can make a success of Sanondaf North Wales and continue to grow the business to a stage where I can take on some employees. I will then be calling on Business Wales again to help me with the next stage of our development!
If you want to read more success stories of how Business Wales has helped other people like you to start or grow their businesses, visit https://businesswales.gov.wales/case-studies or follow @_businesswales / @_busnescymru on Twitter.