A clear strategy based on recruiting the right staff and giving customers exactly what they want while nurturing client retention is certain to trigger a pipeline of profitable business, according to Richard Pennington, Managing Director at 4net Technologies.
Pennington's ambition is to be the first port of call for organisations looking to transform the way they communicate internally and with their customers, and he aims to generate revenues of £25 million-plus within five years. "We will get there through staff development, the recruitment of the right new people, aligning all of them to our company objectives and ensuring we look after our customers," he confidently stated.
To say that Pennington is on track for growth would also be to invoke his early days in the comms industry while working at Telinet, then a small but growing reseller business based in London. "I spent three years in the mid-90s carrying an SDX INDeX on and off the tube trains, learning and serving my sales apprenticeship," said Pennington. "In those days, all leads were self-generated and there was a degree of scepticism about independent resellers. Positioning a 15-man reseller which had little or no reputation against carriers, manufacturers and a few larger resellers proved difficult."
But the daily challenge of working for a small business fostered an entrepreneurial spirit and can-do attitude. "Those early years covering Central London and working for a small business had a big impact on me," added Pennington. "We had to make things happen, source opportunities, find the equipment to sell, do our own project management and on many occasions attend a customer site as a stand-in maintenance engineer. These experiences pushed me outside of my comfort zone and taught me to deal with any customer issue."
Pennington then moved to a larger more established reseller, Genesis Telecommunications. "I was amazed by the amount of support, project management and technical resource we had," he said. "However, I created a new challenge for myself by leaving most of that behind to move to Genesis' newly opened Manchester office as the third team member and first dedicated sales person, joining the people who are now my co-Directors at 4net. What I learnt from Genesis is that having a great culture in a business, where everyone loves coming to work combined with a sense of purpose enables people to achieve great things."
Following a three-year stint at Genesis, Pennington moved to Central Telecom (since acquired by Vodafone) where he gained his first management experience running the Manchester office. Soon after he was recruited by Redstone to build a northern sales operation for what he says was one of the first 'truly converged' businesses. Redstone was a professionally run organisation with around 500 employees, offering telco, ISP, network integration, PBX/IPT and IT/desktop services. "It sounded like a sales person's dream," said Pennington. "However, building a sales team from scratch and selling these services was a challenge.
"My biggest learning point at Redstone was the re-enforcement that good people are key to success. No matter how hard you try as an individual and how much coaching, training and support you put into a team, there is only so much you can achieve if you don't have the right people to start with."
Following Redstone's acquisition of Xpert Communications in 2005 there was a period of confusion when the senior management team underwent a reshuffle. This was the catalyst for 4net's four founding directors - Frank Jennings, Mike Jervis, Steve Tyrrell and Pennington (who had worked together before) - to do what they had often discussed and set up on their own as 4net Technologies.
"The company has achieved profitable growth every year since inception," said Pennington. "There have been many deals along the way that have pushed us up a level or into new territory. Building teams in the Midlands and London has also helped us to accelerate our growth and create a scalable platform for further expansion."
4net Technologies has realised an impressive 270 per cent growth over the last three years. Turnover is forecast to hit £7.7 million this year with projections for £10.8 million in 2015. The company now has 39 staff stationed across three offices in Manchester, London and the Midlands. It targets customers in the mid-enterprise, enterprise and public sector with a specific technology focus on contact centres and managed services. "We have undergone significant internal changes in all aspects of the business to help create growth," added Pennington. "But the most significant step has been the development of a scalable internal structure."
Another big change in 4net Technologies' go-to-market strategy has been its approach to managed and cloud services. "We have gradually added to our managed and cloud services portfolio to meet customer demands and to differentiate ourselves," commented Pennington.
"We also focus on UC and contact centre which are underpinned by our managed services. We work closely with our customers to enable workplace and customer experience transformation through the relevant implementation of technology. We manage this through building strong long-term relationships and have a customer retention rate of 99.96 per cent."
4net Technologies has collected a number of awards in recognition of its managed services offering, called 4net ESP. The company has also been chosen to represent the UK in the European Business Awards for Customer Service, having garnered plaudits for building a staunchly loyal customer base.
The 4net Technologies team has also retained a loyal and fruitful partnership with Avaya that dates back to the mid-90s. The company is now an Avaya Platinum Partner and also has a rapidly developing MS Lync practice. "Our Lync proposition has contact centre at its heart, and we work with strategic partner Enghouse to enable enterprise class contact centre capabilities within Lync UC environments," added Pennington.
Aside from the aforementioned, there are a number of additional areas that interest Pennington such as video and BYOD. But key to growth are cloud and customer experience transformation. "Cloud services provide flexibility, scalability and redundancy," explained Pennington. "This is an important area of growth and focus for 4net Technologies as traditional hardware revenues diminish. We have built our own core cloud infrastructure in order to deliver private cloud solutions and integrate public cloud services into our hybrid offering."
The second focus area, customer experience transformation, draws on the firm's contact centre and customer interaction capabilities. "Almost all of our largest clients have a contact centre at the centre of their operations, whether that is 50 seats or 500 seats," noted Pennington. "A few years ago customers were only interested in reducing their contact centre costs, now they're focused on customer experience transformation to win new customers and maintain the loyalty of existing ones."
The end user consumer now demands a real-time response via the media of their choice - voice, email, web chat, social, mobile etc, at the time of their choosing. If organisations cannot provide this they risk losing customers within a few clicks. "Our clients need to transform in order to meet this demand," said Pennington. "4net has therefore developed this capability. We now have a portfolio of services including our own applications to ensure customers maintain a competitive advantage."
In this technology-orientated customer environment traditional revenues from hardware and equipment, and even software in some cases, are no longer available. But revenues from managed services, consultancy and new areas of technology more than make of for those losses. "Resellers need to adapt their models rapidly to ensure they remain relevant to the customer," commented Pennington. "My priorities over the last 12 months have been to ensure that we have the appropriate internal people and structures in place to continue our rate of growth and that they are all aligned to our company objectives and end user requirements. Recruitment of the right skills and experience remains our biggest challenge."•