Case Study – Air-ITJune 2014

Sector: IT services No of employees: 29Turnover: £1.25m (2013)Location: NottinghamGrowth Manager: Tim SuttonService used: Business Development, Leadership & Management Training

Snapshot – impact of GrowthAccelerator

• A strategic plan to achieve sales of £2.5m by 2016 which will deliver ahead of schedule - the £2m barrier will be broken by August this year

• A new management structure which includes a tier of newly-recruited managers who are delivering growth and freeing directors to focus on strategic planning

• A unique portfolio of business management systems which is enabling the provision of world class managed services and the targeting of larger, high-potential clients.

About

Founded in 2005 by Managing Director Todd McQuilkin, Air-IT provides a full range of outsourced IT support and managed services to businesses across the East Midlands as well as nationally and internationally. It has partnerships with leading software and hardware suppliers including Microsoft, Sage, Dell, Cisco and Sophos, is the trusted IT partner of over 300 businesses and has a 98% customer retention record. Last year, the company acquired MBC, a local company providing fully-managed communication services, enabling it to offer clients a fully converged ICT solution.

The business challenge

After eight years of healthy, consistent growth - over 20% year on year - Air-IT was keen to develop a blueprint for the future that would set out what was needed to deliver its enhanced offering and accelerated growth and successfully integrate its newly-acquired communications services business. ‘They were ahead of the game in wanting to move from being an IT provider to a managed services provider and to make this happen they needed strategic direction, team alignment and the right infrastructure in place,’ explains Growth Coach Stuart Ross.

How GrowthAccelerator has helped

Starting in May 2013, Stuart worked with Air-IT to define its vision, values and opportunities and create a roadmap to reach its objectives. This focused first on embedding a clear common culture and communications. Attention then turned to the structural and system changes needed to continue the business’s transformation into a unified, high-performance provider of managed services.

Air-IT is well on its way to realising its ambitions, with a strengthened management team skilled and motivated to play its part, following Leadership & Management Training, and a robust business management system which is differentiating the company’s operations and enabling it to move beyond its competitors. This simplified single-business solution streamlines and automates operations and processes, integrates with remote monitoring, management and support systems vital to its expanded offering and will make it easier to manage all aspects of the business as it grows. With this platform in place, Air-IT is more confidently and proactively targeting clients beyond its own region and has already opened a regional office in Merseyside.

‘GrowthAccelerator has been a positive and empowering experience and we have become more profitable and slick as a result,’ says Air-IT Marketing Director Paul Judge. ‘We needed to take time out and work with someone from outside the business to look at what we were doing and where we were going. This helped us lay down some foundations to enable us to adapt our mentality and infrastructure and make the transition to a fully managed service provider. GrowthAccelerator has contributed to all of this and we will definitely grow faster than we would otherwise have done.’