The Latest News from Wrexham Business Professionals

Event Preview - 4th February 2016 - Powering Regional Prosperity - The Climate for Business

A Leading entrepreneur who left school with no qualifications and went on to develop a global multi million pound company in his spare time will pass on the secrets of his success to an influential audience of Wrexham business bosses next month. Alan McCall, managing director of Nu Instruments, based on the town's industrial estate, will be one if the keynote speakers at the latest meeting of Wrexham Business Professionals at the Ramada Plaza on Thursday February 4. He will join two Welsh Government Ministers, Carl Sargeant and Jane Hutt, in addressing the group which includes highly skilled firms of solicitors and accountants working together to raise the profile of expertise that exists in the region and beyond. Mr McCall will tell members about his early beginnings as a 15-year-old Merchant Navy mechanic and his subsequent career which saw him found Nu Instruments as a sideline while still working as a firefighter. The company, which last year celebrated its 20th anniversary, currently manufactures a range of highly sophisticated measuring instruments which are snapped up by universities, laboratories and commercial organisations across the world, including the NASA space agency. The state of the art mass spectrometers made by Nu Instruments are aiding cancer research and one of its machines was used in the United States to determine the origins of a murder victim. Mr McCall, 58, left school without any qualifications and joined the Merchant Navy at 15 to become a ships engine room mechanic. After a few years at sea he moved to a shore job as an instrument technician with a defence contractor working on guidance systems for British forces and acquiring qualifications as he went. He also became a part-time firefighter and loved the life so much that he eventually became a full-timer, based first in the south of England and later in Wrexham. He recalled: "Although I knew firefighting was the job for me, the money was pretty bad so I started...... more ›