Pivoting to success

William Makant and Yusuf Muhammad founded Plumis in 2008 to develop Automist, an innovative sprinkler system. A decade later Plumis has a £2 million turnover and Automist is installed in 5,000 homes - but everything about it is different, from the product itself to the people involved. The secret to their success? Being able to pivot, to change strategy by learning about a market's key drivers. In this podcast William and Yusuf describe their journey, and the how and the why of their dramatic course change. They outline the pros and cons of working with Angel Investors, and describe how raising more money at the start might have made the company less successful. 

William is an experienced Mechanical Engineer and Product Developer with a family background in the fire protection industry. He led multiple engine development projects at the Ford Motor Company in Brazil, Germany and the UK before joining Plumis. William holds an MBA from Imperial College, London. He likes to cycle and has a keen interest in motorbikes.

Yusuf is a co-inventor of Automist. He’s a multi-award winning industrial designer with an Honours Masters degree in Engineering and a double Masters in Innovation Design Engineering. Yusuf has experience working with P&G, The Department of Health and Research in Motion. Yusuf appeared in Big Life Fix, a science series following a group of tech experts as they tried to come up with innovative interventions to transform the lives of people all over the UK.

Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.

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Podcast links:

Plumis - Easy to retrofit Automist fire sprinklers