You Need
Inclusive Technology is entering its tenth year. Indeed as I write this it is nine years to the day since Trish Hornsey and Roger Bates joined me in the fledgling company which had been set up a month earlier as a new division of a computer games company, now long gone.
On April 1st 1998 Trish, Roger and I were able to complete a management buyout and Inclusive Technology Ltd tottered in the world rather top heavy with three owner-directors out of a total team of five!
There are now seven sets of accounts which chart our progress since then. Today we have thirty staff, all in various ways serving those who help with people with disabilities or work with learners with special educational needs. The directors have grown in number from three to five with Helen Carr, finance director, and Sukhjit Gill, commercial director adding professional expertise to our management team. Meanwhile sales of our products, training and exhibitions have grown to £4.8 million this year.
2005 has seen steady growth of 6% and modest net profits of 7% as we have become, by some considerable margin, the major educational supplier of assistive technology in the UK.
Sales of our own products are now growing very strongly as we begin to reap the benefits of a large increase in software development initiated three years ago and ramped up again this year. Programs such as SwitchIt! Maker 2, ChooseIt! Maker 2 and Choose and Tell now make a considerable contribution. Our current investment in individual websites for each key product will add value for each community of users with support, activity sharing and teaching ideas.
Our customers now increasingly look to the Internet for products and ideas, and this gives us opportunities to serve a wider network of professionals from education, health and social services as well as those with an inclusion role in the world of work and the Universities.
As well as serving this wider group, the low catalogue costs of the Internet mean we can offer a greatly expanded product range to each of these groups and send out targeted short-run catalogues to exactly match the interests and needs of each.
None of this will diminish the service we offer to education. Our ten regional Information Days aimed at schools and LEA services are now routinely over-subscribed with 80 to 100 applications for places at each one. Our three UK national exhibitions help educators and therapists keep up with the whole field of assistive technology with thirty or more of our colleagues and competitors exhibiting as our guests. We provide major sponsorship for events and organisations like the international congress, ISEC 2005; EENET; the British Dyslexia Association’s international conferences; Early Years 2005; and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists 60th Anniversary Celebrations.
However, serving a wider audience with interests in ergonomics, communication aids or independent living while increasing still further the depth of the service we offer to special needs in education should make our second decade as interesting and worthwhile as our first.
Martin Littler
1st October 2005