Martin Hellawell says reseller will aim to add £70m to top line every year as he talks to CRN about Softcat's first year as a public company and growth plans
It has been almost a year since you floated on the LSE. What have been the pros and cons, and would you recommend doing it?
I don't want to give a blanket recommendation, but it's worked for us. The downside for us is that I have to spend probably 25 per cent of my time doing things like results days, so that's less time to do the customer and employee thing. The other downside, which I think we've managed to overcome, is we are a very open organisation. I sit in the middle of the sales floor and don't have an office, and information has been completely transparent. But we can't share financial information with the company anymore because it could lead to insider trading and it breaks stock market regulations, so we have to be less transparent with the financial performance. We used to make the P&L available to all staff every month; that is no longer the case.
The upside is, it certainly improves your brand recognition. It gives you a certain shine and credibility. You phone up a prospect and say 'we're Softcat' and they say they've never heard of you. You then say 'we're a FTSE 250 company' and suddenly it puts you in a different category and they take you a bit more seriously. It's also been an interesting journey for staff. We've been transparent about the process with them and not many staff have the opportunity to go through that process.
Click through to the next page to find out what Hellawell really thinks of cloud and why he thinks more and more firms could 'uncloud'
