In his passion for giving customers what they really want and need, Steffan Dancy, Managing Director at Rydal Communications, has built an award winning business.
Dancy owes much of his business success to the attributes he acquired during a promising soccer career that was curtailed at the age of 23 following an injury. "This did, however, instil the ethos of winning, working as a team and delivering to the best of your ability, which today exudes through the Rydal Comms office," he said.
Dancy was first exposed to telecoms through an independent mobile airtime reseller, an acquaintance that inspired him to pursue a new opportunity. Rydal Communications was incorporated in 2008 and started trading in 2009 from a bedroom where Dancy ran the operation on his own. "After two years I decided that it was time to grow," he stated. "I moved to a small office and recruited Stephen Watkins who is our Operations Director and Mark Worraker our Sales Team Leader. As a team we were heavily focused around mobile, and in 2012 we embarked on the broadband, calls and lines and hosted system market."
Today, the company has a 23-strong headcount and is a specialist at delivering unified solutions in accordance with its growth strategy. Another big turning point was gaining access to funds. "Once we understood where the market was going we invested money in expanding," noted Dancy. "This has heavily paid off and further re-investment from myself will come over the following months to position us for the next phase of growth. Our turnover run rate is currently £2.5 million, up from £1.78 million last year. We have consistently delivered year-on-year growth and our intention is to achieve £5 million turnover within the next three years and £10 million within five years."
An important part of Rydal Communications' business plan is its relationship with Ericsson-LG and Pragma. Rydal scooped their 2016 New Partner of the Year award in February in recognition of its sales and delivery success. Dancy credits Ericsson-LG's flagship products in registering high sales and he is already making inroads with the vendor's new cloud solution launched earlier this year. Rydal's target market is businesses with 10-250 extensions but it also boasts a handful of enterprise clients including Change.ORG, Multi-York Furniture store and a recent contract win from Deafblind UK.
IT and energy also feature prominently in Dancy's longer-term plans. "We already offer elements of bespoke IT services but will have a sharper focus on these areas over the coming 12 months," he added. "The convergence of comms and IT is growing stronger. Our main priority is managing the fibre pipe that goes into the business and everything that sits on it, including IT. Further growth may come from acquisitions. However, this will happen when the right opportunity comes across our path."
Following a growth plan is not always plain sailing and Dancy's biggest challenge is ensuring that the business has the right systems, processes and management structure in place to deliver sustainable growth. "Over the past 12 months we have focused on building the right team to implement our strategy," he said.
"We have been, and still are, investing in our people with a key focus on training all of our staff, including the management team. Focusing on our people has resulted in a huge improvement in the business over the last year. Service delivery to our end users is better, slicker and more organised. In hindsight, I would have invested in the right CRM systems and built a support structure around our sales team earlier. Many small businesses make the same mistake of having sales people do far too much."
How best to manage workloads is a question Dancy himself was forced to address on a personal level. "I used to work every hour under the sun, consistently 8am-8pm for three years and started to burn out," he commented. "Someone older and wiser told me to remember one thing in life, 'health before wealth, otherwise you spend your wealth getting your health back'. This really stuck with me and made me make changes to the hours I was working.
"I realised that to grow, I couldn't do it on my own. I needed to invest my time into others and allow them to spread their wings. Letting go of your business is hard to do, especially when you have built it up from nothing. For me it got to the point where I had no choice. Thanks to the people we have here it's been a blessing in disguise."•