Comms Business Magazine met up with Andrew Skipsey, founder and Managing Director of Fareham based reseller M12 Solutions to find out more about the company, the business culture and his views on the market.
Comms Business Magazine (CBM): Tell me about your company, the background, what you do, highlights from the past and your ambitions for the future.
Andrew Skipsey (AS): The company was established by myself under an agency agreement with Azzurri and operated out of their office but soon broke away and moved to our own office in Fareham, Hampshire. M12 Solutions was essentially a telecom reseller prior to the 2007/9 financial crash, a period that proved to be tough for us. By 2011 we emerged from the recession, wiped our brow and took time out to consider where we would go as a company.
We are currently halfway through a six-year plan to get our turnover to £12m. We still provide what you would consider to be comms platforms but we go about it in a more diverse way. We became an ISP in our own right and started our Rural Internet brand, Wessex Internet working with a third-party organisation who act like ‘our version of Openreach’ to build the physical network which we technically manage. We have taken advantage of business development schemes and grants as they became available and are now a thriving, growing business with 24 staff, 1800 Rural Internet and 250 B-to-B comms customers, and office in The City.
We have direct Internet connections with two main Internet centres in Docklands and are about to get a third. These give us access to very competitive pricing and better control of the whole customer service experience. We send and receive over 250Tb of data per month these days, which is a big responsibility. I now have two of my sons fully engaged in the business with Luke running Wessex sales and Matt the technical brains behind our network and he also brings in some great new deals.
We are now entering some BT exchanges and are branding our non-Wessex, national ISP service ‘Giganet’ and Luke’s team is being developed to grow this area as well. In 2013 we took advantage of the Government Growth Accelerator scheme of facilitated business coaching – I’m a great believer in education, and this scheme helped provide a vision for where we were going and a believable means to get there. The result is that today 80% of our income is from recurring revenues, we can plan with confidence and are on track to hit our turnover target by 2020.
CBM: Your view on the current state of the market – what’s selling?
(AS): Service is a big differentiator of M12 and we get a lot of telecoms business and professional service revenues via intermediaries, for example IT firms that find a voice a black art. These informal partnerships are working really well and we are gaining a reputation as a quality partner. I can’t remember when we last supplied new ISDN circuits, it’s all SIP today and being an ISP helps here as well. The market seems to be quite influenced by location. In London for example we find that users are more receptive to hosted telephony and I’d say that most resellers there are focusing on that deployment model.
Overall I would say users are looking for a single source provider, plus a few x-factors on top of their break-fix maintenance service. they want pro-activity, included remote work, awesome levels of response and I’d say prefer steady, long-term, proven suppliers. We have developed our own cloud ‘version’ of SpliceCom called DBX for these hosted applicaitons and this is also securely located in our datacentre environment. Hosted telephony is also growing elsewhere now as users look for a scalable, subscription based model that is fully inclusive.
CBM: Who are your key supplier partners?
(AS): As well as SpliceCom and ShoreTel we have direct relationships with Openreach, TalkTalk, V1 and SSE for Ethernet and Gamma for SIP. I’d like to give a shout out to Plan.com where we are in early days with their mobile offering and Fidelity Energy to see if we can break in to that market. Also we’ve been with TMS since 2004 who provide our bureau billing. All have useful portals to help us provision and manage efficiently.
CBM: What do you see as the biggest threat/opportunity in the short term for M12?
(AS): The market and technology is always evolving. Microsoft could be a sleeping giant about to pounce – it might happen – but it’s over short-term horizon and in any case, could be both a threat and an opportunity. Obviously, the external factors of the Brxit deal and how we and other deal with next year’s GDPR challenge is going to influence our progress, with our regular income stream we are, hopefully better protected than most. The biggest opportunity will come from the increased systemisation of our back office (going even more digital) to improve our sales, marketing, provisioning and support to improve our reach and efficiency. In 6 months, this project should be complete, I’ll let you know how it goes.
What I do know is that having a great business culture such as ours at M12, trumps a lot of what you have in your business. The doors don’t revolve here, you can build a career and over time, the good people we have found, have referred other good people to join us. Empowerment and effective communication have been the keys to developing this culture and this year we took the whole company skiiing. A fantastic investment in team building.
