This month, MEPCA celebrates Sam Baynham, Founder and Director of ConeX Portal UK. Speaking with our editor, Sam shares how his experiences in engineering inspired the founding of ConeX and highlights the problem-solving power of a community for industry.

Reflecting on his route into industry,Sam said that while he took the conventional STEM subject path, it also felt like a very natural progression for him. “I was always quite hands-on with things, mainly breaking, not really fixing,” he joked, though he had always taken a keen interest in how things worked.

After studying mechanical engineering at university, Sam began working at Delcam (later purchased by Autodesk), which allowed him to specialise in CADCAM software and gifted Sam with an insight into manufacturing businesses, allowing him to learn properly about the industry, in a hands-on way, something that he believes to be missing from formal education.

While his time at Autodesk was eye-opening, it wasn’t long before he was frustrated with the limited scope of the role and was eager to branch out on his own. At just 26, following a short stint as a self-employed CADCAM specialist, Sam founded Dynamic Edge Innovation Ltd to help businesses with product design, from concept through to prototyping. This ultimately grew into ConeX Portal UK.

“The more manufacturers I’d speak to, the more challenges I’d hear, the more things I’d find out that they were struggling with. The more I’d recognise that the sector isn’t that joined and doesn’t really have that community voice. It doesn’t have that connectivity; there’s no consistent voice or message.”

By connecting companies struggling with similar challenges, ConeX Portal’s community could attempt to solve them together, learning from one another’s experiences, rather than struggling on in their own “silos”.

“When you get in room with people and you decide on the topic and the theme and the main challenge that was holding them back, suddenly everyone’s invested in talking about that.”

Once those ideas gain clarity, ConeX can then put them forward to industry bodies and other groups, creating a consistent voice and message, which is crucial for giving manufacturing SMEs a voice.

Without doing the ground work and defining clearly what the sector needs, Sam explained, the government won’t “see a unified SME engineering manufacturing sector with a list of problems that it can address.”

What can we expect to see from ConeX Portal UK in 2026? Each year Sam starts with a defining word and this year’s is “perception”, referring to both how the industry needs to change, and how ConeX needs to shift its perception as a networking group, to a community connecting people, leveraging skills and “facilitating projects through the entire supply chain.”

To learn more about the important work Sam is doing with ConeX Portal UK, visit the company’s website, or better yet, stop by to speak to him at Southern Manufacturing & Electronics.

conex-portal.co.uk