Ex-Insight man Fenton hails new venture's success

QuantiQ on track for £25m run-rate revenue in two years

Former Insight bigwig Stuart Fenton has opened up on his mission to turn his latest venture QuantiQ into a £25m run-rate revenue firm in the next two years.

Last June, Fenton's firm QuantiQ took a slice of Tectura UK – the local segment of the global Microsoft Dynamics ERP partner – after the bank which owned it looked to break it up. He said the small function was "not profitable, and not functioning particularly well" at the time he took it on.

Since then, Fenton (pictured) and his team have been building up the company and making significant changes, which he claims has put the company on the path for rapid growth. CRM is at the forefront of the company's strategy over the next 24 months, he said.

At the moment, the firm has about 110 staff – up from 60 a year ago – and a run-rate revenue of between £13m and £14m. Fenton claims that within two years, the company should be heading towards the £40m run-rate revenue barrier, with a number of new staff on the books too.

Profit is on the rise too, he told CRN.

"In terms of percentage profit, the business is far more profitable than Insight, as you would expect from a primarily services business," he said. "In cash terms it is very strong, but we have chosen to invest most of the profit into growth in existing and new business areas."

His approach to turning the old Tectura business around came in four parts, he said.

"The first area we spent a lot of time on was how to create demand," he said. "The sales organisation was under scale so I brought in a new sales director who I had worked with before – Mike Atkins [former Insight vice president of technology solutions] and we basically doubled and then tripled the size of the sales team.

"Secondly, we did a rebrand of the company – to QuantiQ, of course – internally, with our clients and then externally. The third thing was operational efficiency: the company was not being run particularly well at the time in terms of professional and managed services. So we changed the leadership and then we implemented some very well-recognised, industry-standard delivery methods. We also [looked] at the team and bringing in new talent who are all A players – the strongest in the market. We did go through a little bit of a process to remove people who were not performing very well.

"The last thing we did was from a finance point of view. Given my experience at Insight, we brought in a much stronger finance function... regarding bank, client and cash management. It transformed the company. We went very, very quickly from a loss-making to profit-making situation and from there we largely focused on growth."

Currently, QuantiQ is focused on the Microsoft Dynamics stack, which Fenton said will remain the company's focus for the next couple of years. QuantiQ carries some other vendors' kit but only if it is complementary to the Dynamics offering, and he said any other strings added to the company's bow would be in the Dynamics area. He said maintaining a laser focus will be the key to its long-term success.

"There's more of a professional services requirement [on that technology] and it is far more of a client-partner relationship versus a transactional relationship. What I wanted to get out of this by getting into this world was to exit the very transactional relationship one has selling licensing or products. This is an area which creates long-term client relationships which are deep and lasting."

"Coming home"

Before setting up QuantiQ last summer, Fenton spent 11 years at Insight as its EMEA president. He left two years ago. He said life running a smaller firm takes him back to when he started his career.

"It's actually back to my roots – I set up my own business back in the late 80s, early 90s, while I was still studying, actually – that started off doing custom development for clients and moved into the transactional space," he said. "Largely, this felt to me a little bit like coming home.

"The differences are big in terms of what we sell, but there are some enormous similarities – you're managing a sales organisation, you're managing a pipeline – the only difference is [at QuantiQ] you're several layers closer to it.

"I am involved in everything from making sure the door is locked to closing deals. It is enormously rewarding."