Top VARs 2018 Q&A: Edward Cook, AVMI

The CEO of the largest audiovisual specialist in this report explains why Brexit is driving its international growth

This Q&A originally appeared in CRN Top VARs 2018.

What would you pick out as the key driver for the growth you have seen in the last year?

We are seeing the shake-up that is being caused by Brexit, meaning that our big clients are opening up new offices in quite a major way and we expect that to carry on right through the Brexit transition.

Our client space is particularly strong in the financial services area, so a lot of our big banking clients are considering the implications of Brexit and are all looking at moving staff to Dublin, Frankfurt and Paris. On the back of that demand we decided we needed to have a local capability in Dublin.

AVMI is now the largest AV provider in the UK. What do you think has contributed to you holding that position?

With Focus21 (which AVMI acquired earlier this year) we are now well over £75m turnover, so unless some of the competition have had some amazing growth - which they might have done - I think that we are quite considerably above anyone else. I think the market is moving in our favour. Because AV has become mainstream, big corporates are looking for big suppliers.

We now have 490 staff, but the fact that amazes everybody is that 250 of those are in our services department, either on-site running the AV systems, or service engineers doing more traditional support. We certainly feel that is a big part of our success.

Do you envisage more consolidation in the market, and are you on the lookout for further acquisitions?

We have now made nine acquisitions so we always have our eyes open, and we have always had success with acquisitions. If one is going to play on the global scale, organic growth takes too long. You want that as well, but the opportunity is now.

Are there any emerging technologies or trends you expect to become more prominent in 2019?

We think Zoom is going to make a big impact on the mobile videoconferencing space, and we have spent the last year getting fully up to speed on that, so we're now an authorised integrator. We are seeing big interest in that from our large corporate clients.