Thowing a curved ball (Insight acquires MINX)

I was stuck in a garage getting a pair of rather well worn front tyres replaced just before we completed the acquisition of MINX by Insight. John was keeping me updated on progress re the paperwork via phone and it gave me a bit of time to reflect on my time with MINX and future plans.

I joined the company just over a year ago to work with a bunch of very smart people led by a highly charismatic and talented MD. My original role title was 'Technical Director' which was great for the ego but was not how I wanted us to shape this part of the business hence the change to Client Services Director the same week!

We have created a fantastic services focused business. Our Customer Sat scores are consistently running at 95% as scored by our clients and Cisco have us pegged at 'Customer Satisfaction Excellence'. Just as importantly we have great customer relationships. We don't just deliver stated requirements, we work hard to understand our clients business, drivers, aspirations and constraints. We then add in our own deep understanding of networking technologies and their best practical application to maximise ROI. We strive, wherever possible, to exceed our clients expectations!

I guess my favourite bit of customer feedback in recent weeks was from a City business that wanted to test the MINX 'hype' by getting us to run a major phone system upgrade. Having experienced a number issues to date with previous services partners they were prepared for the worst! The end of project summary read as follows: 'The only problem was.......there was no problem!' Decisions often have to be taken after we sign-off on requirements. Our project managers and highly experienced consultants work closely throughout the project with our clients to ensure that the right decisions are made and we deliver a great end result.

I'm incredibly proud of the close relationships we have built up with Cisco and our other trusted partners. All of who share our focus on integrity, quality and high customer satisfaction. It really has been a team effort that has helped us to differentiate MINX in a very competitive marketplace.

We have been able to attract some incredibly talented people to come work with us over the past few years. We recognise the long term benefits of investing in people and create fully funded and custom fit development programmes. MINX has a remarkably flat company structure and we are all held responsible for maximising the quality of our end product . We also look after each other, at times people do drop the ball and it's important that we're all there to help out and turn any problems into a solution.

It was interesting to look at the many different reports of our decision to integrate MINX with Insight. They all seemed to simply repeat the standard communications that were issued. These communications are intended to satisfy the various legislative requirements around company reporting but it might be useful to share my personal perspective here.

Looking ahead we had a number of options on how we could grow the business. Over the past year our revenue and margins had been steadily increasing along with our client base. We could have continued to grow the business organically albeit with a very tough market very slowly for the next 12-18 months. Another option would be to throw a bit of a curved ball (hence the image to the left!).

We have had a close relationship with Insight for a long time and I guess you could even argue that we had been dry running this for a while before we considered formalising the arrangement. They have a fantastically successful business and are a lot of fun to work with. The logic behind our decision to integrate is absolutely brain dead simple, put a business with a large sales team and highly sophisticated operations back-end together with a business that works closely with its clients to create large complex programmes of change. The only question really is why didn't we do it much earlier!

Will we get lost in the bowels of a large corporate and lose the agility and client focus that has helped MINX become so successful? If we were simply merging two similar businesses that might have been a risk. Insight and MINX have great chemistry but are very different businesses, there is little if any overlap. Stuart Fenton the EMEA President and Angelo Di Ventura the UK MD are on exactly the same page as John, Clinton, Chris and myself. We're going to build on the existing model and dramatically accelerate our existing growth plans.

MINX was a great place to be last week and it is an even better place to be today!