Top VARs 2021: Q&A with Softcat CEO Graeme Watt

Watt discusses the company’s journey to the top, how it saved money during the pandemic and what the future holds

Softcat is now the largest company of your kind in the UK. What significance does this hold for you and your team?

It's been 28 years in the making. It's a really important milestone in the company's history. Internally we talk a lot about gross profit as a primary measure of success. But revenue, or gross invoiced income, is what we invoice to the customers and is a lot of people's primary measure of how relevant you are to the industry.

In your annual report, you pegged your total addressable market at £45bn, meaning you have four per cent marketshare. Is there a ceiling to how much share you can take?

We think there are about 50,000 businesses and public sector entities in our addressable market, and we deal with around 10,000 of them. There's got to be a point at which it's a lot more difficult to grow share. But we're a million miles away from that. Our focus continues to be on deepening our relationships with existing customers and pulling in new customers. We think we've got loads of runway to keep doing that for many years to come.

You saved £1m a month on travel and event costs in your fiscal 2021. How much of that will come back in 2022, and do you want it to come back?

Yes, we think they're good costs. Our kick-off event, our partner event, and our big charity ball would be three that stand out. We're a sales and services company and people are very excited and motivated by some of the trips we put on. The only bit that might take longer to build back is some of that travel and entertainment stuff, as not all customers are fully back up to speed and not all vendors are having conferences in the same way they did before.

It's the ten-year anniversary of Top VARs. Four of the top ten players from 2011 (Kelway, Danwood, 2e2, Misco) no longer exist, at least in their previous guise. What will define success or failure for the next decade for today's top 100?

We see our role in the channel is to help customers navigate through complexity, choice and the speed of change in IT infrastructure. And I think success for us will be determined by continuing to be relevant to our customers and being customer led. If you take our last two years, which were dominated by the pandemic, we've grown headcount by 26 per cent. I think our appetite to invest today - and most of our investment goes into people for tomorrow's growth - is unparalleled, and that's another critical factor that will mean we continue to succeed in the coming ten years.