About Us
Innovation and advancement of knowledge are at the core of everything that Gears does but not for their own sake, we are only interested in innovation and knowledge advancement that deliver clear commercial benefits to our clients business activities. We strive to achieve cohesion between commercial success and academic research.
Gears business model involves close engagement, cooperation, and collaboration with our customers. We make targeted R&D more accessible to our clients so they can overcome their business challenges. Many organisations in the ground engineering and civil engineering sectors do not routinely engage in R&D activities, often because of the potentially significant up-front funding and cash flow issues.
Through collaborative funding or fully self-funded research Gears can make beneficial R&D more accessible to our clients with the costs of the R&D only being incurred by the customer once the savings are being realised, thus eliminating the negative cash flow issues.
Gears was established in July 2017 by Paul McMillan a former Partner with Fairhurst. With a background in applied research and consultancy across a range of engineering disciplines, Paul wanted to bring a fresh approach to the funding, implementation, and application of research and specialist consultancy in ground engineering and civil engineering.
In 2021 Paul asked Thomas Clifford to join Gears to accelerate the quarrying-related research and consultancy services side of the business. Thomas joined Gears from Atkins where he headed up the extractive industries UK and the mining digital innovation team. Prior to working for Atkins, Thomas was a senior geologist and geotechnical specialist for Aggregate Industries.
The accelerated programme of in-house research and specialist consultancy has led to Gears developing and implementing some of the most advanced digital solutions for blasting, product control and geological/geotechnical data acquisition for the quarrying industry.