LDD Group reorg bearing fruit

Bullish VAR on growth path and in recruitment mode after turning its sales model on its head over past year

Leeds-based LDD Group is seeing business and customer numbers spike after completely changing its sales model in 2014.

And the firm is aiming to smash through the £14m turnover barrier in the coming year, after seeing revenue grow 29 per cent, and profit 16 per cent in its 2014 FY.

Its customer base has grown by 20 per cent in the past 12 months.

Mandi Iles, commercial director at LDD, explained: “We decided last year to change how we work as a company.Rather than be a traditional reseller that just runs after accounts, we decided to turn that on its head and restructure the company.”

She said the firm traditionally had a transactional team, and had kept a core customer development transactional team, but had now focused on five key areas: telecoms, cloud, managed print, networking, and maintenance in the education space, with specialists looking after each of them.

“We looked into our database and talked to them about these areas, then started getting business. Particularly schools maintenance has been a growth area for us – we are having conversations with schools and understanding how they actually use ICT.”

Iles added that LDD had started marrying up some of its corporate clients that refresh every three years with schools, and as a result they had created new ICT suites for schools at a massive reduced cost.

“We have doubled the number of schools we work with in a year,” she said. “And it has allowed us to get their back-end infrastructure right so the technology actually works the way they want it to.”

Currently the aim is to perfect the model in Yorkshire, but grow it in other areas of the UK in the near future, she said.

Iles added that growth had come from all areas of the business, and now it is actively looking to recruit new technical specialists to add to its 38-strong team.

“We are on a recruitment drive and need to make sure we have the right people in place for growth,” she said.