Rob Fowler: Director of Business Development

Rob might not have been with Brompton on the official date of its origin – the day the first processor shipped – but he was very much part of that day. At the time, he worked for a rental company and helped take delivery of the shipment. It wasn’t long after that, in March 2013, that he joined and became Brompton’s first full-time employee. 

On joining, Rob briefly held the title ‘Partner Programme Manager’. “It was one of those, ‘What does that mean exactly?’” titles, Rob jokes, but the title could point in a few different directions – he was involved in the programme to bring other manufacturer and end-user partners on board, he provided technical support and conducted customer training. He was also doing a degree of business development even then, and as the company grew and his role evolved, that was the part of the business he found himself spending more and more time on – first as business development manager and then, from September 2019, as business development director. Over the years, our customer-facing team has grown to a much larger team, based worldwide, and includes Business Development, Technical Sales, Technical Support and Training. 

Rob has also witnessed how the business has grown to cover virtual production as well as live events, a trend that had started to gain momentum from 2018. “We saw significant amounts of equipment going to VP and we’d already decided to explore features we could develop to help users working on in-camera visual effects with LED” explains Rob. “When the pandemic hit, it made sense for Brompton to put not just some, but almost all our development efforts behind that for a period. But it took more than a year for live events to come back, and now they’ve really come back, which is great. In the meantime, ICVFX has grown to become a really important revenue stream in its own right, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with live events.” Rob adds, “We haven’t seen the full potential for ICVFX and we haven’t seen the full return of live events yet, but last year was a record year for Brompton, so it will be interesting to see how the balance develops, and there are other market areas that interest us too.” 

For Rob, the great joys of working at Brompton are the teams that have been assembled in both support and development. “I knew the level of engineering in the Carallon team from having worked with some of them at Flying Pig Systems; I knew that they would be delivering great products. It’s a real pleasure to be able to represent incredible quality equipment.” He quips, “It’s so much more fun than working with rubbish stuff!” Concluding, “Likewise, it has been tremendously rewarding to be a part of building the team we have to support our fantastic customers and give a level of service that does justice to the ambitious projects they deliver week in and week out with our gear.”