How this Microsoft Gold partner doubled revenue in a year

CEO expects revenue to smash £10m-revenue barrier next year

Microsoft Gold partner Tisski has almost doubled its revenue in a year, according to CEO Anna Assassa.

Tisski has yet to finalise results for its most recent year ending 31 August 2019, but the chief exec told CRN that turnover would be "around £8m" - roughly a 90 per cent jump on last year's turnover.

Assassa (pictured) founded the CRM specialist in 2011 and it has seen exponential growth in recent years, due in part to an increasing number of public sector clients, including the Ministry of Defence, the Accident Investigations Branches and the Department for Education.

Public sector organisations currently account for 70 per cent of Tisski's business, she said.

She attributed the revenue boost to being on frameworks, including G-Cloud, and customer referrals.

"We have had quite a big leap forward this year," she said.

"We tend to do one year forward a lot, one year of heavy investment, one year forward a lot - certainly, as far as EBITDA and as profit goes.

"In the tech industry, you have to keep growing to give people those career opportunities too, so there has always been a focus on growth and to keep moving forward."

Tisski has an office in Coventry and currently has a headcount of 95, which Assassa expects will grow to 100 before September is out, but she has no plans to set up another office.

"We do business all over the UK and we might get another office, but I feel that offices are a little bit old-fashioned," she explained.

"I like the customer site working and allowing people to work from home - we've got a big trust culture. I'm OK with coming into an office, but there needs to be a point to it.

"We mainly have an office [in Coventry] at the moment so that our staff can come and see one another and so we have a place for customers to come for meetings.

"We would certainly get another office if we felt there was a need. But at the moment, with the technologies [available], I'm embracing the idea of homeworking."

At the age of 26, Assassa founded Clear IT - after a stint working in contact management for Bank of Australia - and ran it for seven years before selling it in 2005 to Fifth Dimension Systems (which itself was acquired by K3 in 2011).

She said she "dabbled" with other vendors before ultimately sticking with Microsoft as Tisski's sole vendor.

"In my first company, there were multiple vendors involved, but I always believe once Microsoft entered the market, that they would be the market leader," she stated.

"Microsoft has such a great footprint in Office, Excel and other things that people use as they grow up through basic education. I felt that Dynamics was always going to be a market leader.

"We have dabbled a little bit, but Microsoft's product range moves so fast and they invest so heavily, I really do believe they give a great experience to the user.

"I think it's very hard for other software vendors to keep up with the amount of investment and the product range as it is now and I love the way that it all hooks together, almost like pieces of a jigsaw."

Assassa expects Tisski's revenue to break the £10m barrier for its next year and plans to expand into machine learning and Azure to achieve this.

"I want to start moving the company further into machine learning and some of the services around Azure which maximise that," she explained.

"In our area, we do two ERP products and finance and operations is the higher-level product, which we just touch on at the moment, but we want to do more of it.

"I'm going to be very disappointed if, by this time next year, we haven't turned over 10 million.

"That really is my aim, but to do it sensibly and profitably and maintain a good, stable team and good customer relationships."