Ultima Business Solutions on fast-track growth path

MSP eyes £100m turnover club as it celebrates its 25th birthday, and takes office moves, refurbishments and recruitment in its stride

Reading-based Ultima Business Solutions is gearing up for significant growth in 2015 after a year of investment and forward planning.

The firm, which turns 25 this year, recently signed on the dotted line to gain ownership of a new business park to house its growing workforce, and is set to start building a swanky new HQ on the site.

It is also close to signing the contract for a new London office to house 80 sales and technical staff, which will quintuple the square footage of its city HQ.

Max McNeill (pictured, right), CEO of Ultima, explained: "We have been where we are for the last 18 or 19 years. We acquired the site of our current HQ and six years later bought the building next door and in 2002 installed one of the first NOCs in the UK, christening it our technical centre.

"We have been operating managed services for the last 12 to 13 years and recently completed a £2m refurbishment of the offices and technical centre, and have also invested £800,000 in doubling the capacity of our warehouse to 30,000 sq ft.

"We have now just bought a business park next door to our technical centre because we need to build a new 20,000 sq foot HQ building there to house our growing sales team. That will be complete by summer 2016 and allows us to grow. Our London office will attract people from the home counties as well as the Thames Valley area. This is proof that we are investing for the longer term and unlike some of our larger competitors we are growing organically."

He explained that the firm currently employs 320 staff, but is looking to expand that to 400 by the end of March 2016. McNeill said the firm is on course to hit £90m turnover for its FY ended March 2015, and for the next financial year is determined to smash the £100m barrier.

"We are still involved with products, but we are an MSP," he explained, adding that the firm is a top partner of vendors such as HP, Citrix and VMware and is a seven times Gold partner and LSP with Microsoft.

In terms of acquisition, McNeill said he would keep an open mind and would "never say never", but stressed: "It is our intention to grow organically."

He added: "We have managed to see out some tough economic times and the dot com bubble, and we have grown the business organically. We have over 100 employees who have been here over 10 years and we have a stable workforce. All shares in the company are held by the workforce and we are debt free. We are in a strong position. We have a lot of exciting things going on at the moment."