Good things often happen under strange circumstances.

Take for instance the founders of Future Fresh. Their story begins with swapping day for night, pay cheques for passion and employment for entrepreneurship.

It’s 2010, and Andy Williams and Nathan Kohut find themselves working for the same E-Learning company, which had started to expand and grow rapidly. This unprecedented situation called for a night shift to be initiated and Andy and Nathan were tasked with making it happen. For those of us who think work is best associated with daylight there’s collective dread of having to start work at the same time the pips of early Evening News beckon us to relax. Not so for these future pioneers of Data Visualisation. For them, when the going gets tough the tough can be rendered as an infographic – and easily shared amongst others wanting the instant low down on what a tough time looks like.

For Andy and Nathan the nightshift became the rightshift. Having read that entrepreneurs in the making must learn to survive on little sleep, our industrious duo used their days to launch their own business idea, which went by (and still does) the name of Future Fresh. Soon downtime became fulltime, and bedtime reverted to, well, bedtime.

Loughborough University soon became a home from home, and it was here that the business won its first clients and the heart of Chris Coleman, employee No. 3. With the portfolio ticking along nicely, and with the Future Fresh name a by-word for world-class Data Visualisation, the company moved to Nottingham’s Creative Quarter. With its business head(quarters) in Nottingham but its heart still in academia. Future Fresh continued to build upon its early reputation for providing second-to-none Data Visualisation. For it was the research specialists and academic institution that had early on grasped the significance of being able to present data that was…presentable.

By December 2014, with further expansion on the cards, and an international client base now to service, a must-fill role in business expertise was needed. Up to the challenge stepped David Dahill, bringing with him a great deal of big industry experience that covered policy and processes and a very useful post-grad qualification in data analysis and communications. Three had now become four.

Future Fresh, in its short dynamic history, has always looked to capitalise on the growth of Big Data, a phenomenon happening throughout the public and private sector. With a diverse client portfolio that still retains links with Universities, but which now includes global training providers and manufacturing giants, Future Fresh is still very much in the business of taking complex data sets and turning them into dynamic and legible data visuals. It is from the raw materials of so much information that they are able to craft the necessary nuggets of true knowledge that is the real currency of the Information Age.

With additional guidance from Stuart Ross (Business Mentor of the Year) and Jason Burrows (Advisor on Rapid Innovation to some of the UK’s biggest brands) 2015 is proving to be another milestone year in a company that aspires to introduce its own nightshift….so watch out you night owls!

Written by @jasonburrows for @_FutureFresh