VAR LambdaTek sets a date with the Queen
Oxford-based IT reseller beats tough competition to win a 2015 Queen's Award for Enterprise
Champagne corks will be popping at Oxford-based VAR LambdaTek after it scooped the 2015 Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade.
The fast-growing firm only started selling IT equipment in 2005 and quickly became established in the UK as a top e-commerce player.
It sells to both commercial and consumer customers via its own website, and third-party platforms such as Amazon. But it made the decision to expand into Europe three years ago, and has seen a whopping 600 per cent growth in sales over the period.
Just 140 Queen's Awards have been announced UK-wide this year for outstanding business, and winners are invited to attend a special reception at Buckingham Palace, as well as having their award presented to them in the summer.
Winners can use the Queen's Award emblem in advertising, marketing and on packaging for a five-year period after winning.
Tom Felici , chief executive of LambdaTek (pictured), told CRN: "We received an invite from the Queen's Office earlier this year to apply for the award, so someone must have tipped them off about us. It looks like we were competing with hundreds of other companies.
"We are now a multi-million pound turnover company, and our expansion has been down to us developing our own in-house IT system, leaving our employees free to do what they do best , which is giving top customer service, and not have to worry about managing orders. We are one of the few companies where our customer service teams are actually bigger than our sales teams!
"Providing the best customer service has been our priority from the start, and we were one of the first to actually publish our phone number on our site because we wanted customers to get in touch with us."
He explained the company took a slightly different approach to others, when it made the decision to expand to the EU.
"We picked focus countries - France, Germany, Italy and Spain - and most recently, Greece. But instead of employing third-party companies to do the translations, we developed our systems so that that an employee within each country could recreate our website in their own language and currency, and actually get the satisfaction of seeing orders coming through in their own country," he said.
Felici added winning will have a positive impact on LambdaTek's business.
"We hope that this award will really give us a push into the limelight and it is believed winning firms experience a 20 per cent increase in business as a result. We are very interested to see if this also makes a difference within the EU itself as well."
He also stressed that while international expansion was an important part of their business, the UK was still LambdaTek's core market.
"Moving forward LambdaTek remain focussed and committed to our home market in the UK, which remains our main source of business with an ever increasing number of happy UK repeat customers," Felici said.