Softcat CEO on future growth, bolstering headcount and why demand for tech is stronger than ever

Graeme Watt says Softcat is pressing on with recruitment after seeing revenue surpass £1bn

Following the publication of Softcat's full-year results, CEO Graeme Watt opens up on the firm's plans for future growth.

What is your summary of another year of strong growth?

We were able to achieve growth in every single quarter which is a fantastic testament to the team, and it's all organic.

We made really strong gains with our customers. We grew our customer base, we grew our GP-per-customer metrics too, and so we were able to get deeper into existing customers.

We surveyed our customers during the pandemic in July and we increased our net promotor score from an already-impressive 60 to 66. That is an endorsement that we were engaging better than ever with our customers during the challenges of the pandemic.

I'd also mention the broad base of our performance. That balance serves us really well so if sectors or technologies go hot or cold at any particular time we are still very much in the game.

You saw impressive growth in services, with sales up 36.6 per cent. Did you do anything in particular to drive that?

There is nothing specific. We haven't done anything more or less with services. For us it's a combination of our managed services and our assessment service around security and cloud.

We've never tried to over-push or under-push services. Like everything we do in the organisation we are very customer led and if we think there is an opportunity to build our own capability on services that customers are demanding, we'll do it.

If we can't we'll partner with somebody, and then we obvious resell services which is a big chunk of our services too.

Following the publication of Softcat's full-year results, CEO Graeme Watt opens up on the reseller's performance and plans for future growth.

The report shows that headcount increased 15 per cent in the year you've just reported, and you've said that you're looking to recruit in the current year too. What areas will that be in?

It's a little bit across the board. We're continuing our policy of recruiting first-time sales people, so graduates and apprentices. That is really important to us because we want to keep growing our share of wallet and new customers.

We'll be putting even more, as we have for the last few years, around our specialist and technical resources to support account managers and customers directly.

We're well into the recruitment of those first-time sales people.

We've already had a big cohort of apprentices join, I think somewhere between 30 and 40. And we've had our public sector and specialist cohorts as well, I think that's another 20 or 30. And then we've got two cohorts of corporate sales starting one - next Monday and the other in December.

Have you found recruitment to be more difficult given the challenges around working in offices now?

Everything we're doing has got to take into account hybrid working. Our apprentice recruits are in the office three times a week at the moment and we anticipate that our graduate sales recruits will be spending some time in the office as well.

We've worked at home very effectively; we work in the office even more effectively, so we take the benefits of being in the office and mix it up a little bit. That way we can balance some of the impact that we may have had if we're entirely remote.

From an on-boarding perspective we're quite early in that process but we've made it virtual and stretched it out over a longer period of time because extended periods on Teams calls can be quite draining.

You said in the financial report that you saw a "softening" in demand from corporate customers during the last third of the year. Is that a big concern for you?

Not really, because it will come back and remember still delivered growth in every quarter last year.

Remember lockdown is still there; it has not gone away. It's tightening again at the moment and some people in some customers are still be quite cautious about what they're going to spend on, particularly if it relates to on-premises where perhaps they can't do installation.

I think the demand for technology is as healthy and robust as ever before. We have talked about the pandemic shining a light on technology and how well the industry has been able to operate.

It's really healthy and gives us a tonne of optimism about the future, it's just a question of how quickly the corporates will turn that spend back on, so I'm not concerned about the mid-term and long term.

You've recently had a transition of senior management, with Colin Brown stepping down as managing director and Richard Wyn Griffith taking the role. How is that going?

It's been great. Rich is a long-term employee of Softcat, he joined as a graduate. Sometimes when you get a change from the outside you wonder about the cultural fit, but we don't have that.

So he has settled into very well and very quickly. We see a little bit less of Colin now which is natural given the changes happened in August, but Colin is still helping us in a few particular areas.

Rich had his first assignment when he took over the hosting of our sales kick-off, which we held virtually. That was his first big exposure to the masses and he did that very well.