IT services – David Bailey

21 January 201912 January 2021

Virtrium joins Chaucer Group

The merger of Virtrium into Chaucer Consulting was announced recently – an important milestone for both firms.

My story here begins in the summer of 2016 when the Directors of CIO Advisory firm Virtrium asked me to assist them with their forward growth strategy. Virtrium had a good brand in the market and a wealth of satisfied, long-term clients so I was happy to take a look. We spent time understanding why clients came to Virtrium and what they were asking Virtrium to help with, and gained a wealth of information.

From this, we honed propositions into three groupings that follow the life cycle of CIOs’ key investment programmes, namely IT Strategy, IT Architecture and IT Transformation – and with these being focused in on the Digital or Omni-Channel agenda that many IT functions are needing to supplement their own teams with external expert assistance. Altering Marketing messages and sales collateral to suit, the team was able to explain better the core focus of Virtrium and how it could assist its clients.

The results have been rewarding – a similar level of “point solution” assignments but, crucially, a much larger demand for Virtrium to assist its clients across complete programmes, taking lead roles in implementation phases.

Moving the clock forward two years to last summer, the Virtrium Board felt that it would be able to support its clients more easily if it had access to a larger team of programme and change management resource, and recruiting these was both taking an inordinate amount of effort and taking too long. Accordingly, we went out into the market to talk to other consulting firms that come from a programme, project and change management background.

In Chaucer, not only did we find the necessary capability but also a wealth of business consulting skills to sit alongside Virtrium’s IT strength. Also, Chaucer was already heavily involved in the implementation of Digital Transformation programmes without necessarily having been involved in the earlier strategic definition activity – Virtrium therefore provides the Chaucer team with additional much needed expertise in IT Strategy and Architecture. A true “win win” or “2 + 2 = 5+” scenario.

It’s only been a month, and with the Christmas break within this too, but client feedback has been excellent and supportive with some programmes involving one “heritage firm” or the other being extended to include the expanded capability.

I’m delighted to have been involved across the journey so far and look forward to witnessing the next chapter – the continued growth that the combined business will undoubtedly enjoy going forward.

See here for Virtrium’s press release.

11 June 2017

The future’s uncertain…….and bright!

Theresa May stood outside Number 10 after her audience with Her Majesty the Queen on Friday and announced that she will now form a Government to provide Britain with “certainty”. Really? The only thing more certain coming out of this election is that the country has a much stronger second party in Opposition than was the case before she called it.

Whatever your political persuasion, we are faced with a “fog of uncertainty” as Larry Elliott wrote in The Guardian, investors are “unnerved by economic uncertainty” as reported on the BBC, and business leaders are “appalled at the prospect of more political uncertainty” as Sarah Gordon reported in the FT.

So should we be despondent? What does all this uncertainty mean, for business and for our Professional Services and IT Services industry in particular?

Well, let’s take a look at what needs to happen in the wake of recent events. Both Public Sector departments and private sector businesses have a broader range of forward Brexit scenarios to consider than they thought before and they’ll need help with scenario planning now and with solution design and implementation later. Security, both physical and cyber, needs another round of thinking and additional solutions to be implemented to make citizens, consumers and businesses be and feel better protected. Businesses with strong export trade have a window of opportunity to exploit with an even weaker pound – let’s help them expand in existing overseas markets and conquer new ones. Equally, our own services are now even cheaper to buy by non-UK clients for a period – we should be talking to our international client base and capitalising on this.

Quite apart from these, there’s a huge amount of change happening that has no link to whether things are certain or uncertain in UK politics – the pace of change won’t slacken just because of a somewhat unexpected election result. We’re heavily involved in lots of this change and the demand for our expertise and resources won’t diminish any time soon as:

consumers continue to utilise digital channels alongside traditional ones, requiring omni-channel business strategies and integrated IT and supply chain solutions
software manufacturers push their customers towards their shiny cloud-based solutions and the customers have to decide whether to go with this and the IT transformation programmes that result or stick with existing systems that work well enough but which may need to be self- or third party-supported
big data gets ever bigger – analysing data and extracting the critical intelligence needed to make business decisions swiftly is becoming ever more important
the opportunities created by artificial intelligence become better understood – it’s not just about automated factories any more
….and so on….

The political environment may be uncertain but the future for our industry is bright!

18 April 2017

Overseas acquirers are on the lookout!

At the time of writing, I’m looking at a foreign exchange website and seeing that £1 will buy around €1.18 or US$1.25, making our overseas summer holidays more expensive this year. Maybe stay at home and mix with the larger volume of inbound tourists?

Overseas businesses are seeing things more like US$1 will buy 80p or €1 will buy 84.7p, which is much more sterling than they’re used to – so, now that it’s clearer to them that the UK won’t cease to exist after Brexit and is even likely to prosper, they’re seeing the UK as a good investment prospect, as evidenced by recent announcements from Qatar, Nissan and Lidl.

The UK has always been a stepping stone for US businesses wanting to expand into Europe and vice versa. Outside of this, the English speaking world likes to set up a base in the UK and even list on the UK Stock Exchange, which has tended to provide a stable foundation to build upon. The weakness of the pound, which isn’t likely to change much any time soon, is contributing to an increased volume of such activity.

In our Professional Services and IT Services world, we’re seeing a similar picture and there is a number of UK-focused acquisition programmes led by overseas headquartered firms that I’m aware of. This activity in the market is pushing valuation multiples up a little but it doesn’t matter too much for the acquirer as the exchange rate is more than making up for this.

Does this mean that the time to package up your firm and sell it is now? Well, it depends. Initial search activity from overseas buyers may not necessarily be as well focused as it could be – “let’s go and research what’s available in the UK and see if there are some reasonably decent firms that we can pick up for an OK price!” – so you may get some initial inbound enquiries and/or interest if you hang up a “for sale” sign. It doesn’t take long beyond a first meeting, however, for an acquirer to focus in on the fundamentals of a firm, including:

– quality of work

– breadth and depth of capabilities

– a client base to leverage

– a decent revenue, gross margin and EBITDA profile

– a baseload of forward business.

I’m amused to see how some firms have been “respraying” themselves to look “hot” – e.g. process improvement consulting firms now displaying a Business Transformation message, IT advisory and project management firms jumping on the Digital bandwagon and some even trying to “double up” on Digital Transformation! If it’s a genuine change in direction for these firms, they’ve invested in the new positioning and have evidence (case studies, industry awards, a decent number of trained consultants etc) to back this up (Note: it’s normally a three or so year programme to change direction properly) then fine. A swift respray, however, is unlikely to work since these overseas acquirers aren’t desperate to buy – they’re taking a look and may buy if the search exercise uncovers something genuinely interesting. In my own activities on the acquirer side, it isn’t difficult to distinguish between the ends of the spectrum and “pure respray” firms are unlikely even to know that we’ve taken a brief look!

So the overseas acquirers are here for a reason, they’re investing but they’re not being silly!

21 March 2017

Marketing is about “Being There”

Many Professional Services firms don’t really “get” Marketing – it’s a drain to pour money down which could otherwise go into Partners’ pockets! IT Services firms tend to “get it” more but the spend can often be focused on things that take up lots of time and budget for little effect. So what’s the problem?

Marketing professionals talk about the “Marketing Mix”. In Services Marketing, the original 4Ps of product, price, promotion and place are expanded to 7Ps, adding in process, people and physical environment …. and some people even add an eighth, namely performance – this is a lot of Ps! If we’re running a services firm and don’t have much Marketing experience, we find all these Ps a bit difficult and uncomfortable and, hence, tend to gravitate to one end of the spectrum and do only what we feel comfortable with (e.g. buy hospitality tickets for the rugby and invite some clients and a few prospects) or the other and try to cover all the bases. Both approaches fail in most cases.

Let’s start with what we’re trying to achieve. When we boil it down, we’re looking for Marketing activity to generate sales leads. In services businesses, sales leads must lead to face-to-face sales meetings because we all know that, in this industry at least, people buy from people…so they’d better meet and get the chemistry going as soon as possible if any sale is going to be made!

Now, it’s increasingly true that there are hygiene factors to consider that don’t directly lead to sales leads or which, if handled poorly, can hold sales opportunities back. A consulting firm that I’m working with had a sales campaign put on hold recently when the potential client wouldn’t introduce the consulting Partner to his boss to get a decision until the firm’s web site was more fit for purpose…which it now is! Which hygiene factors to address and how much to spend on them is worth thinking about – I’d suggest that you do just enough to create an environment within which your target market might start to get a warm and fuzzy feeling. So you want to tweet – why? You want an article in the FT – do the people who buy your services read the FT?

It’s best to decide which specific messages you want to get to which specific audiences and then, alongside creating something of an environment around this, research how to get to these audiences – which industry journals they read, which conferences they attend etc – and then put Marketing spend and effort into delivering your messages into these places, consciously and deliberately avoiding spend in places that don’t fit with this. If this involves face-to-face contact as part of the Marketing activity then this is fantastic since it gives you a better opportunity to start building a relationship and increases the likelihood of getting that all important face-to-face sales meeting.

About five years ago, I worked with an IT services firm focused on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing – they had reached a plateau and were getting frustrated. We took the same Marketing budget that they were spending by trying to cover all the bases and focused it onto getting specific messages into three vertical industries, and we aligned the sales team up behind these industry messages. The result? 50% growth in revenues the next year and 65% growth on top of that the following year.

Decide where you need to be and then “be there”!