New Focus Group CEO predicts 'exciting few years' for reseller

Barney Taylor tells CRN that Focus Group will continue to be 'fiercely acquisitive' under his leadership

Focus Group's new CEO Barney Taylor has highlighted a continuation of the company's "buy to grow" strategy along with an expansion of its IT services and traditional telecommunications offerings as key target areas of growth for the business under his leadership.

Taylor was announced as the new CEO of Focus Group - ranked 64th in CRN's VAR 350 - earlier this month having previously spent more than three years as Ensono's Europe MD.

The Sussex-based firm, which offers a range of IT services and solutions in areas such as telecommunications, connectivity and cybersecurity, recently moved to acquire Scottish telecoms provider GB Technologies and Taylor told CRN that the company will continue to be acquisitive while he is CEO.

"We have very aggressive organic growth plans, but you will continue to see Focus Group being quite fiercely acquisitive as well," he said.

"We're going to buy to grow. We're going to buy for more scale but we're also going to buy, in the future, for capability. We'll buy companies that we can grow and that will add on top of organic growth rather than just replace it. So the mixture of the two, I think, is going to make for quite an exciting few years.

"I think you'll continue to see us acquiring for more core capability and scale. If you now look at Scotland, we've got over £20m revenue so you can see that's becoming a very important regional territory for us and you'll start to see quite a lot of geographical coverage.

"We believe we're turning into one of the largest independent telecoms providers now in the UK and we're going to continue on that trajectory."

Focus Group saw its revenues grow by 13.6 per cent to £79.4m for 2020 and is backed by private equity firm Bowmark Capital, which has supported the company's growth plans with a £150m war chest.

Alongside further acquisitions, Taylor outlined plans to further grow the business organically by not only focusing on its core telecommunications offering but also by expanding the IT services proposition at Focus Group.

"Focus has had double digit organic growth for over 15 years now so it's not acquiring because it's not growing, it is acquiring because it is growing," he added.

"I think there's a lot of opportunity in telecommunications that will come onto the market, so we will continue to drive that telecommunications core, but there are other opportunities. I think this business could be scaling up in IT services, which is obviously a lot more of my background.

"We are very fast growing in enterprise networking, SDN and some of those other some of those other areas. We're not constrained by legacy and we're not a reseller that that's been in the market for 5,10 or 15 years.

"So, we will continue to accelerate our ambition in the traditional areas, because it's been so successful, but there are areas such as wider IT services, managed services, SDN, and enterprise networking which I think will give us even more growth."