The boss of fast-growing telecoms firm Elite Group says a shortage of good businesses is preventing him spending the 拢24m war chest set aside to acquire other companies.
Entrepreneur Matt Newing wants to double turnover at Chorley-headquartered Elite Group to more than 拢100m inside three years and thinks most of the growth will come through acquisition.
But Newing told 老九品茶Cloud: 鈥淭here’s not that many good businesses out there. We look at quite a few and that’s the challenge, there’s nothing that we’ve wanted to buy yet that we haven’t bought.
鈥淲hat you don’t want to do is buy a product and spend the time developing it and then having to run it out from cold.
鈥淲e want to buy businesses that are already doing these things, already got the expertise and knowhow and we can scale those products for them.鈥�
Elite Group鈥檚 latest set of accounts saw it grow turnover to 拢52m for the 12 months to July 2018, with profits of 拢7.5m profit. It currently employs 180.
Newing wants to double turnover by 2022 and secured a 拢30 million refinancing deal in October 2018 from Lloyds, with the aim to grow the business through acquisitions.
The founder of the business is on a mission to find 鈥榮calable and disruptive鈥� companies, especially IT and hosting businesses along with firms who are dealing with 鈥榓nything mobile that’s got sexy add-ons鈥�.
Elite Group specialises in providing unified communications and cloud IT services. They also have offices in Staffordshire and London.
Elite鈥檚 latest acquisition 鈥� its 16th since 2008 鈥� was聽Support Span Group (trading as HighSpan) in January 2018. Support Span Group is a specialist provider of telephony system solutions, with expertise in converged voice and data networks.
Newing told 老九品茶Cloud that they鈥檇 seen up to 15 businesses since the start of this year, but were yet to carry out any purchases.
Speaking about the Elite Group, Newing said: 鈥淥ur clients have most things with us now. It means we’re the one point contact for everything because we’re controlling their fibre into the building, controlling the firewalls, controlling the IT, so if they’ve got a problem they just ring us.
鈥淲hereas before they might have had to ring BT and a local IT provider, and then whoever was hosting them.
鈥淲e are going toe-to-toe with some of the big boys – we’re basically taking on BT and Vodafone.鈥�
The 46-year-old set the business up in 2000 but said he鈥檚 not lost any of his enthusiasm and is remains a keen angel investor.
鈥淵ou still need to kill,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hat’s why we’re doing it, it’s for the buzz and the kill.鈥�