Alex Fitzgerald got the keys to his first factory on January 6, 2025. Eighteen months later Isembard has 14 factories across the US, the UK, France and Germany, just under 100 people, and a business model nobody in this industry has run at scale. Ten of those factories he doesn't own. They belong to franchisees.
The franchise piece is the part I keep turning over. Before he started, Alex went through the McDonald's franchisee process himself, worked in a restaurant, got all the way to an interview with the chief restaurant officer for the UK. He doesn't look at McDonald's and see a burger business. He sees heat treatment and assembly, run to the same SOPs in every location, for a customer who knows exactly what he's getting. That's the bet. Build the systems once, then hand them to people who own their own shops.
I gave a talk at the Top Shops Conference back in 2017 arguing something close to this. Even if you never open a second location, run your shop as if there's one a thousand miles away that you'll never visit. If it only works because you're standing in it, it doesn't really work. Most shops fail that test, and Alex named the reason. Too much of the business lives in the owner's head.
We get into the practical side too. How he found his first four people, why he spends about half his week hunting for the next one, the hiring process that ends with a candidate standing in front of the entire company, how work gets funneled across 14 sites, and the two setbacks that actually hurt, an AS9100D audit and a machine crash.
You may never franchise your shop. But the systems thinking here is 10% worth the hour.
What's Covered in this Episode
- (0:00) Learn more about Alex Fitzgerald and his journey to Isembard
- (4:24) What Isembard makes in 14 factories (and the franchise model behind the growth)
- (7:39) The two books that made him care about manufacturing and the manual mill course that sealed it
- (9:56) The MakingChips machine giveaway with DN Solutions and Kennametal
- (10:41) Sourcing locations, hiring great people, and finding customers
- (14:57) Sean in Exeter, from a LinkedIn DM to a live factory in under 90 days
- (17:09) Justin, the Green Beret who ran a Chick-fil-A, and the first US factory in Dallas Fort Worth
- (18:52) The two kinds of franchisee, new builds and conversions, and what they screen for
- (21:55) Take your shop to the next level with DN Solutions + automation
- (23:07) Building a business development team that goes and gets demand instead of waiting for it
- (26:39) How the SOPs got written, and making the happy path the only path
- (28:16) My 2017 Top Shops talk on shop franchising, and why consistency is the product
- (29:46) The real problem with most shops—everything lives in the owner's head
- (32:16) How they've been able to hire 100 people in 18 months
- (35:41) Kennametal's Next Level Shop at IMTS 2026
- (37:13) Narrowing down machines to purchase versus work they're winning
- (38:31) The two setbacks that stuck: The AS9100D audit and the machine crashes
- (40:58) Map the employee journey like a customer journey—including the way people leave
- (44:21) How Alex funded this franchising venture with investors
- (45:54) How work gets funneled across the network and what a franchisee does with overflow
- (48:00) The franchisee conference Alex launched for training
- (50:09) Vibe coded internal tools and hiring software people from outside manufacturing
Resources Mentioned
Connect with Alexander Fitzgerald
