Comms provider DRC is looking at potential acquisitions as it embarks on an aggressive growth strategy, according to its new Chair, Roger Flynn.
Flynn recently joined Newbury-based DRC alongside its new Managing Director, Sue Elliott, and the pair opened up to UC Today about their plans to accelerate the company’s growth.
The firm was founded by Dene and Karen Roberts in 1989, who will remain on the board of management but are handing the day-to-day running of the business over to Flynn and Elliott. It has historically been a large Vodafone partner, and in recent years has expanded into new areas, including Internet of Things, SD-WAN and data connectivity.
Flynn and Elliott are adamant that they will not be “diluting” DRC’s focus as a comms provider as they want to retain that reputation as the go-to specialists among their customer base.
“We’re pretty clear we want to remain a comms provider; we don’t want to start adding offerings to the mix that – from our customer’s point of view – dilutes the fact that we are experts in comms,” Flynn stated.
“The core of it is an acceleration of organic growth by broadening existing products, adding new products, staying within the comms space and really piling in the engine of growth of sales and marketing. Customer service is really strong, so we want to make sure that remains so and, while the historic growth rate has actually been good, we want it to grow at a much faster level.”
He added that while their growth ambitions aren’t predicated on M&A, the company is on the lookout for acquisitions that can add some key fundamentals, such as skills, geography.
“We’re interested in companies where a partner wants to retire and they’ve got a decent size mobile connection base, or a UC provider has some interesting product add ons and customer base,” Flynn elaborated.
“The thing that can hold you back a lot when you want to scale is lack of talent in order to get to the next level, so acquisitions that bring a skill set that we desperately need are also on the cards.
“Geographically speaking, a lot of the business is referral based, so a lot of the clients are in and around DRC’s location. An acquisition that gives us more places to be in and talk to clients in would be good.”
Managing Director Elliott previously spent eight years at Windsor Telecom, where she held the roles of COO and MD. She was attracted to DRC because it has been growing consistently and solidly for three decades based mainly on referrals and with a “very loyal” customer base. Her focus now is to strengthen its sales and marketing functions.
“Our growth will come partly through organic, and that will be new logo acquisition and further strengthen our cross sell and upsell to our existing loyal base,” she explained.
“Acquisition will clearly play a part in that too, especially if we can acquire a base that’s probably not serviced as well as we’re able to do, which then gives us a really good cross sell and upsell opportunity.
“We’re also strengthening the marketing function. For DRC not to really have done any of this stuff before and still showing growth every year, I can’t think of very many other comms players that have had such a robust journey until now.”
Flynn most recently served as Chair and Non-Executive Director at Olive Communications before it was sold to Onecom in February. He wanted to remain in the comms space and saw the opportunity to scale DRC.
“It’s a very exciting time in the space: there’s a lot of consolidation and a lot of scaling of players, so wanting to remain in this space was high on my agenda,” he said.
“The thing I like doing is taking a business and scaling it and accelerating it, but the starting point has to be good. The business has to have good, sound fundamentals and I think we can go on a journey and take this to really nice accelerated growth. It feels like a really good place to pitch my flag.”
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