Shannon and Hodgson on 'amicable' ANS exit and future plans

‘We were going to give ourselves six months off and do nothing; but it wasn’t us’, duo tell CRN

Having transformed ANS from a reseller to a digital and public cloud consultancy, Paul Shannon and Chris Hodgson are back in the industry with a new advisory firm that promises to boost the performance of small, agile channel partners.

The duo launched OBT Advisory in January after leaving ANS in October.

Talking to CRN, former ANS CEO Shannon (pictured above, right) said he and former COO Hodgson (pictured, left) were eager to return to their entrepreneurial roots after completing the integration of ANS and UKFast.

"It was totally amicable," Shannon said.

"We wanted to stay at ANS forever - and we thought we would - but it was 750 people and a completely different beast. We realised that there is nothing wrong with recognising that it's not your bag and starting from scratch again."

Despite their restrictive covenants, the pair have no intention of becoming the permanent CEO and COO of a channel partner of any kind again, even in the longer term.

'We were going to give ourselves six months off'

OBT Advisory has a focus on improving the sales, marketing and go-to-market functions of small, agile channel partners, Shannon explained.

"Officially, we left in December. We were going to give ourselves six months off and do nothing, but after about three or four weeks we decided that wasn't for us.

"Chris and I had agreed we were only ever going to work together on whatever we did. We'd learned a lot from the transformations we did at ANS and wanted to use that IP and experience to help other businesses."

Having overseen ANS' sale to Inflexion in 2021, the duo are also geared up to help prepare management teams for a sale or investment process, Shannon added.

"We're known for being straightforward and direct," he said.

"We might pretend to be a potential buyer and rip them to shreds. We try to catch them off guard and then afterwards say ‘right, you stumbled on this, this and this'. We make sure there's no value deflation on the deal just because they don't have the answers."

Appetite for acquisitions

The duo are not ruling out acquisitions themselves, Shannon added, however.

"An intended biproduct of this is that we're stumbling across lots and lots of businesses," he said.

"Chris and I are not planning on being CEO and COO full-time anywhere ever again, but we could look [at a business] and go ‘you know what, we can add a load of value', maybe as non-execs. And maybe we would put some of our own money into that business, because we believe in it."

Hodgson echoed this, saying the pair have no intention of becoming full-time execs again on a long-term basis.

"Tactical, maybe," he said.

"We really enjoy that entrepreneurialism and growth between £10m and £150m of revenue. We can help address sections of bigger businesses, but it's a different feeling every morning when you get up and you're in that kind of growth business," Hodgson added.

"We're at the stage in our careers where we just want to do the stuff we enjoy doing, and we really enjoy working with businesses like that."

Talking about the pair's restrictive covenants, Shannon said they can "largely do what we want".

"We had a fair and sensible discussion around our exit with Inflexion. [The restrictions] were onerous to a point, because they always are for anyone who exits a PE-backed business. But they weren't as onerous as they could have been," he said.

"That being said, we can't, and don't want to, step into an ANS-like business and run the business to compete with ANS. We're not allowed to do that, and we don't want to do it either."