We caught up with another fast-growing mid-market player this week. Dave Rabson, CEO of freshly-christened Acora, gave us a run-down on the business, following the rebranding and re-launching earlier this month of the outfit previously known as ADA Technology Services.
The growth numbers are eye-catching for starters. Rabson tells us Burgess Hill-headquartered Acora is due to post another year of growth in the region of 30% this year. The company will have grown from around £6m revenue at the time of ADA’s MBO in 2006 to around £20m. That includes a contribution from this summer’s acquisition of Microsoft Dynamics-focused PCS Ltd, but Rabson claims underlying growth this year is still up around the 30% mark. EBITDA should come in just short of £2m. More than half the revenue is now on annuity-based contracts.
So Acora could be put in the same rough grouping as Lumison, Onyx and iomart – ambitious UK-based mid-market players earning tens of millions of revenue and growing both organically and through acquisition (see for example iomart: growth and profits boosted by M&A). Except that Acora is not really a managed services player in the mid-market mould. It’s more interested in what Rabson describes as “little boys’ outsourcing”, i.e. taking responsibility for whatever bit of IT the customer chooses to hand off. That could mean running the lot and TUPEing over an IT department with a handful of staff, or it could mean some hosting, managing contractors or staff augmentation.
Received wisdom says the mid-market is increasingly about relatively standardised, albeit customisable, managed services. It would be unfair to describe Acora as a “jack of all mid-market IT trades”. For one thing, it tends to focus on three verticals – distribution, legal and financial. But as a growing business it stands as a handy counter-example to the prevailing industry trends in the crowded mid-market space, and for that reason alone it is one worth watching.