History
Accelerated performance
Newton was established in 2001 by Andrew Hawes, Kevin Jones and Tom Wedgwood. The three founders shared a vision – to use their combined skills and experience to deliver step changes in clients’ financial performance by identifying operational problems and opportunities, and then resolving them.
The team had previously worked on over 40 performance improvement projects – from solving multi-million pound technical issues in chemical plants, to changing the working culture of sites employing more than 1,000 people. Their common belief was that any process could be improved by 10-50% without the need for capital expenditure. And ten years later, with more than 550 projects completed by Newton, this belief has been proven.
Our first client was global brand leader Kimberly-Clark, and within a year we had the people and resources in place to expand our unique offering into the defence sector. Soon after, we achieved an unprecedented increase in efficiency working in the nuclear reactor of an SSN Fleet Submarine during refit, and have since developed our work in defence across air, land and sea with clients including BAE Systems, Babcock and Rolls-Royce.
At the same time, we recognised the opportunities for our work across the Atlantic, and in 2003 Adrian Butler opened a Newton office in Toronto, Canada to begin servicing the North American market.
Our next milestone came in 2004 when CRH plc, one of the world’s largest building groups, engaged us to support their multi-factory improvement programme at Ibstock Brick. Two years later, we launched our private equity division and our headcount grew to 25.
In 2007, we established our USA office, and the following year we created a dedicated healthcare division to work on improvement initiatives within both the NHS and the private sector. When James Frost joined us Financial Director in 2009, our staff number had reached 45.