Medium celebrates silver anniversary

Specialist distributor marks its 25th year in business and aims to hit £50m revenue goal in two years

AV distributor Medium is planning to reach £50m revenue and move headquarters after celebrating its 25-year milestone.

Ian Sempers (pictured below), CEO and founder of Medium, said the success of the business was down to his employees.

"It is not really anything I do individually," he said. "It's building a team of capable, self-motivated individuals who can take the suppliers' products to our customer base and stand behind those products."

Sempers said that the distributor had reached £32m revenue in its financial year ended 28 February, and he hopes to reach £50m revenue within the next two years.

"We believe by continuing to develop product areas and recruit additional key staff, we can fuel that growth and push on towards that £50m mark in the next couple of years," he said.

Medium was founded in 1991, and Sempers bought the distributor's current headquarters in Hayes, Middlesex in 2003, amid fears that the building would be too big for the company. He is now looking for a bigger headquarters in the same area.

"We wondered how we were going to ever fill it," he said. "But over the past 12 years we have done that. Now we want an enhanced showroom to provide demo facilities for some of the new areas that we would like to get into. We want to be able to recruit additional staff and to continue to grow."

Despite high-profile issues in the AV market, including the administration of AV distributor Steljes, Sempers said the market is "not in a rut" and there is "plenty of opportunity if you move with the times."

"You need to ensure your product portfolio is balanced, that you are not too over-reliant on one vendor for your revenues. I think Steljes were very successful for a long time, but their success was tied up predominantly with one manufacturer, SMART. And once SMART took the decision to take the exclusive distribution rights away and go to more of a fulfilment model, ultimately Steljes, with their model, were always going to struggle," he explained.

"Our top customer accounts for less than four per cent of our GP. We are not overly reliant on any one customer. We have tried to change our product portfolio away from traditional projection and flat panels to offering digital signage and videoconferencing as an area of growth away from the tradition projection market."

Colin Messenger, senior consultant at Futuresource Consulting, said Medium is in a good place to take advantage of the growing market for interactive flat panels.

"Medium have been pushing hard on the interactive flat panel products for a few years now and that side of the market is really coming good. So it is very good timing for them. In 2016 Q1 more interactive flat panels were sold in the UK than in the US - around 13,000. It is really taking off," he said.

"One revenue stream for Medium is going to be education, the other is corporate. They are just waking up to getting interactive displays. Now corporates are really becoming aware that their meeting rooms and their boardrooms are really poor in technology. So we are forecasting that the corporate market is going to move very fast. Medium is in a good place for this because they are focused on being a hands-on distribution company. They have the expertise, and the problem with these products is they are complicated."