VAD Progress appoints new UK MD as founder focuses on European growth

CEO Quinn hands over UK reins to grow European market share

Cybersecurity VAD Progress Distribution has appointed a new UK MD, with founder and CEO John Quinn turning his attention to the firm's European expansion.

Progress was founded in the UK in 2016, but has since grown to have operations in Ireland, Spain, Germany and Sweden.

The European bases are however not as established as Progress' UK business, so CEO Quinn has now made Simon Burgess UK MD - allowing him to focus on Europe.

"The reason I have promoted Simon in the UK is because we have had a guy in place in Germany for the last three months and it has been challenging to get it off the ground; it is a very different market to the UK," Quinn said.

"We are being backed by several of our vendors to increase market share in Germany, so I am going to make sure that I am spending more time there, and also more time in the Nordics, to spearhead Europe."

Quinn said that expansions into other parts of Europe are not likely to happen until at least the second half of 2019, but he has already picked out where Progress will likely go next - with the Netherlands the likely location.

However he said futures moves will likely be made once the firm has secured a handful of clients for its managed security services offering, which will be sold through partners.

"We need to win a couple of anchor clients," he said. "To date we haven't got an anchor client, but we have several that we have pitched to that want things like phishing, detection and response, and data governance.

"I have got my eyes on various different locations but for now I won't open up any new offices. I want to get the operations centre in London absolutely working properly, get those clients in, and then replicate it in other regions because that is where the future is."

Despite the business only being two years old Quinn has already pondered how a potential sale will look, claiming that rival firms have already been sniffing around.

Quinn added that this year the business has grown by 330 per cent.

"I have had multiple conversations," he said. "Some of our very large competitors have come to us recently because they are very interested in how we do things, so there are talks on the horizon - and that is all I can really say on that.

"We have had a couple of conversations with private equity companies looking to give us money for growth, which is really interesting, but to date we haven't taken any money; it is all personally funded.

"We are not ready [to be acquired]. I would say we have two or three years of solid growth planned.

"In terms of being acquired, someone will come along in a few years and we'd probably look to do something, but it is interested that people are sniffing around already."