Wiltshire IT company Mintivo sets £10 million turnover target after 50 per cent growth in a year

North Wiltshire IT services and solutions company Mintivo has set its sights on hitting £10m turnover within three years after growing 50 per cent in the last 12 months.

The company has made seven new appointments to keep pace with its increase in customers and managing director Chris Gough, who co-founded the firm in 2018, expects at least ten more before the end of the year.

“We are winning at least one new customer each month so we just need more people,” he said. “We’ve spent three years investing in policy and process and now everything is in place to grow into a £10 million company.”

Last year the Gold Microsoft partner, which offers managed IT support, consultancy, cyber security and business intelligence, saw turnover leap from £1.4 million in 2020/21 to £2.1 million last year – and is aiming at another 43 per cent growth this year.

Its customers, including Castore, Good Energy, Investors in People, Dorothy House Hospice Care Business Cyber Centre and the Ministry of Defence, are primarily in the South West but it is winning more business nationally.

“We aren’t going to get to £10 million unless we spread across the UK so we will invest in new offices and local engineers to support those customers further afield to maintain our passion for exceptional customer service,” said Chris.

Among the new appointments are head of business development Andrew James, senior solutions architect Henry Lavender, and infrastructure team lead Nickey Sharp.

“The positions we’ve filled range from junior entry level right up to senior architect level, which just illustrates the speed we’ve grown at,” said operations director Mark Adams.

“We’ll taking our headcount from 29 up to 40 by the end of the year by adding at least one extra person at every level of our helpdesk, two more working in consultancy and additional people in sales, it’s a real mix across the company.”

Chris said the firm has spent the last three years honing its processes and winning accreditation such as Cyber Essentials+, ISO9001 and ISO27001, as well as adopting ITIL customer service management standards.

“These are all things the level of customers we are working with now expect us to have,” he said.

The pandemic has been a catalyst for businesses to look again at the way they work, which has brought more clients Mintivo’s way.

“One of the reasons we started the company was because a lot of our competitors were still doing what had been profitable ten years earlier – selling desktop PCs and servers to go in the corner of people's offices,” said Chris.

“We could see that Microsoft Cloud and mobile devices such as laptops, which enable customers’ staff to work from anywhere, were the way forward. That may be less profitable in the short term but our ethos was to do the right thing for the customer and build a relationship for the long term.”

It meant its clients were geared up for remote working when lockdown came, and their trouble-free switch became the perfect sales story to tempt new customers.

“We won a lot of business when they talked to their peers about how seamless the transition was for them in lockdown,” said Chris.

The company moved from the centre of Chippenham to the edge of nearby National Trust village Lacock last year and placed heavy emphasis on building the right culture among staff. It even opened ‘The Minchester’ – its own employees’ pub – within the office.

“We also have our training suite, the Mintivo Academy, and we put a lot of effort into making this a great place to work,” said Chris.

He said Mintivo’s growth will come from continuing to win new customers, strengthening links with the MoD and more work with local authorities, as well as helping new and existing clients with managed IT services, improving their cyber security and getting the most out of their investment in Microsoft products.

“We are large enough to cope with any size of new customer but still small enough to really care and offer a really personal service,” said Chris.

“All of the framework is now in place and we have all the compliance requirements needed for scaling up. We have many happy customers and long-term relationships to prove we can do what we say we do, so everything is in place for the next stage of our growth.”

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