Plastometrex is transforming how metals are mechanically tested. Founded in 2018 in Cambridge, the industrial tech company has made significant strides with its flagship technology, Profilometry-based Indentation Plastometry (PIP). Today, PIP is widely used across industries like aerospace, manufacturing, and energy to measure metal stress-strain curves using a quick and simple indentation test.
Despite only entering the market in 2021, Plastometrex’s cutting-edge technology is already deployed by some of the world’s most recognisable companies (NASA, Airbus, Renishaw) and some of the world’s most prestigious universities (Oxford, Cambridge, MIT).
With the introduction of new international testing standards in 2025, the business is preparing for its next phase of growth.
For James Dean, CEO and Co-Founder, this means a continued focus on attracting and retaining the right talent to support increasing demand.
In this case study, James shares how Plastometrex has tackled the challenges of scaling a niche industrial tech company by building a transparent and data-driven compensation strategy with Ravio.
With Plastometrex being a small company, compensation has always been handled by CEO and Co-founder, James Dean.
“Initially, with a team of our size, looking after compensation myself was manageable,” explains James.
“The problem back then though was that I was getting my benchmarking data from places like Glassdoor, which always felt a little unsatisfactory. I was missing relevant and reliable datasets.”
As Plastometrex started to grow and hire more people, James knew he needed more reliable sources for compensation data.
He spoke to local recruiters, and to supplement the information he gained from them, he also looked to the market for a compensation management tool.
He chose Ravio for three main reasons:
For Plastometrex, operating in a highly technical and specialised industry means finding reliable salary benchmarks can be difficult on the best of days. Roles such as material scientists and hardware engineers don’t always fit neatly into generic data sets.
“We’ve always had some difficulty inside the business locating reliable benchmarks for the roles that we have, making it difficult to justify our own decisions around what the salaries should be.” explains James.
“It’s always been a finger in the air situation when it comes to salaries – going with what we think the market is roughly paying for these people.”
In these early days, James used the likes of Glassdoor as a compensation data source – an unreliable source of salary data that doesn’t verify the information submitted by users. But for very specific and technical roles, even this was hard to find.
“It was next to impossible to find benchmarks I could trust for these specific roles,” says James.
“Sometimes you might have thousands of people that have contributed to the average salary mark on Glassdoor. Other times, only three people.”
“You never really know how confident you should be in any of those data sets because they’re so varied.”
Adding to the complexity was Plastometrex’s location. Based in Cambridge, a higher-paying region outside of London, the company had difficulty navigating the gap between national averages and local expectations.
“We were paying substantially above the national average” says James, “but hadn’t fully understood the Cambridge premium”.
“We knew Cambridge might be an outlier to the rest of the region, but I didn’t realise just how different it was relative to national averages.”
This is when James knew he needed to find a tool to help him. Between Glassdoor, other internet sources, and talking to recruiters who naturally inflate salaries for commission – James was at a loss to find data that reflected the right industry, location, and point in time.
In 2024, Plastometrex reached out to Ravio. After seeing our comprehensive, real-time dataset, James very quickly realised the value Ravio could provide.
The risk of losing team members at a really important time was removed because we brought Ravio into the business. It’s expensive to find new people, and it drains time – time better spent growing the business.
CEO and Co-founder of Plastometrex
“When we accessed the Ravio platform, we were able to gauge what the correct benchmarks were for the actual roles I was looking for,” explains James. That’s roles like Customer Success, Sales, and Software Engineering.
“I think if we hadn't chosen Ravio when we did, it’s evident that there would be people in our business that would have been underpaid relative to their peers,” says James.
“The risk of losing team members at a really important time for the business was removed because we brought Ravio into the business.”
“It’s expensive to find new people, and it drains time – time better spent growing the business and being competitive with our existing talent.”
For Plastometrex, Ravio’s salary band tool has been transformative – not just for ensuring competitive pay, but for building trust and transparency across the organisation.
“As a founder, we spend a lot of time defining the vision for the business,” explains James Dean, CEO and Co-founder of Plastometrex. “For that vision to succeed, people need to feel valued and engaged.”
Compensation plays a critical role here. Done right, it ensures employees feel motivated to contribute to the company’s vision.
But for motivation to stick, employees need more than just competitive pay – they need clarity about how their role contributes to the business and how they can grow within it.
“People need to understand where they stand, what’s expected of them, and what they need to do to advance,” explains James.
It’s why James was interested in Ravio’s salary bands software.
Ravio has allowed us to create a framework where everyone understands their role, their pay band, and how they can grow in the company. That's a huge cultural shift for us.
CEO and Co-founder of Plastometrex
With Ravio, Plastometrex has implemented salary bands that clearly define each role’s pay range and progression opportunities. It’s given employees the visual roadmap they need to see their journey at Plastometrex, as well as allowed James and his leadership team to have transparent, data-driven conversations with employees about their compensation and career trajectory.
“Ravio has given us the insights we need to provide clarity to everyone about their roles, responsibilities, and progression pathways,” says James.
Employees now have a clear understanding of their current position within a salary band and what steps they need to take to move forward.
Not only has this level of transparency reduced ambiguity, but it’s also helped to strengthen trust across the team.
“They are clear about the salary band they’re in and what it means to progress within that band,” adds James.
“It also helps us explain what a promotion into a new band entails, which makes conversations about compensation much more straightforward and honest.”
This transparency has had a ripple effect on workplace culture, creating a stronger sense of fairness and engagement among employees.
“We want our compensation philosophy to show employees that we value their growth and contributions,” says James.
One of the most valuable aspects of Ravio was how it introduced structure and consistency to Plastometrex’s organisational chart. As a growing business, James had previously relied on an informal hierarchy as an org structure – one that worked well in its early stages, but became increasingly challenging to manage as the team expanded.
“Before Ravio, we had an organisational chart that was akin to a framework which allowed us to position people in a hierarchical system that we understood,” explains James.
It largely categorised roles across three divisions: technology and science, sales and marketing, and operations. While it provided agility, it did also leave gaps for James to fill – especially in clarifying levelling and definitions.
“We knew we wanted to have something that was quite simple from a hierarchical point of view. We didn’t want lots of complex trees branching off everywhere.”
At first, James’s reaction to Ravio’s levelling framework was one of uncertainty. Ravio has a lot more levels, which on the surface makes it better suited for businesses bigger than Plastometrex.
However, what James soon realised was that every level didn’t need to be used. Instead, it was designed to support growth plans – something that Plastometrex was conveniently coming up against.
“We were finding deficiencies in our existing chart, especially because people were very quickly reaching the limit,” explains James.
“I didn’t have any other choice but to say that the business is continuing to grow and to promise individuals that it’s going to change or opportunities would emerge.”
It was quickly proving an issue, as employees found this answer understandably unsatisfactory. These individuals want to see where they can go in the business, want to understand the distinction between levels, and what their career pathway looks like at Plastometrex.
Ravio's levelling framework gave us a clear structure with defined levels, pathways for progression, and a way to map our existing team to roles that were consistent across the business.
CEO and Co-founder of Plastometrex
When James introduced Ravio’s levelling framework, aligned with Plastometrex’s goals and overall hierarchy, things changed.
“Ravio’s levelling framework gave us a clear structure with defined levels, pathways for progression, and a way to map our existing team to roles that were consistent across the business,” says James.
“For each role in our business now, there's a clearly defined set of aspects, including education, background, responsibilities, leadership.”
This then provides employees with incremental goals to move up to the next level, helping to keep compensation clear, fair, and structured.
“Ravio has allowed us to create a framework where everyone understands their role, their pay band, and how they can grow in the company. That’s a huge cultural shift for us.”
Ravio has helped Plastometrex build a compensation framework that is not only competitive, but also fair, transparent, and scalable for future growth.
By leveraging Ravio’s accurate benchmarks, salary bands, and levelling framework, Plastometrex has been able to resolve long-standing challenges of guesswork and untrustworthy free salary data sources like Glassdoor and LinkedIn job adverts when it comes to compensation.
In its place, Plastometrex can now make informed compensation decisions that reflect their industry, technical roles, and location.
Looking ahead, as Plastometrex prepares to expand further into global markets such as the US, Ravio will remain central to its strategy.
By continuing to provide reliable, real-time compensation data, Ravio equips Plastometrex with the tools that it needs to attract and retain the talent to scale successfully in a competitive landscape.
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