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Shoreham-headquartered, and Hg-backed, Focus Group has acquired again as it continues to build out its portfolio and customer base.
This week, the firm announced it had acquired Lancashire-based Matrix247, which has a portfolio of services covering Managed IT, Managed Print, and Communications (e.g., cloud telephony and managed Wi-Fi). From a revenue perspective, Matrix247 is relatively very small but the appeal for Focus is the firm’s capabilities, which will help to underpin its Contact Centre as a Service offering.
Focus plays in a the very fragmented SME market where the target is organisations with 10-500 employees. That inevitably means it bumps up against a whole range of competitors, some very regionally based and small. It also means there’s a whole smorgasbord of opportunities for acquisition.
Last year, Focus Group’s voracious appetite for M&A saw it hoover up 12 firms and the indications are that the acquisitions will continue through 2025. CEO, Neil Hall, told us that cyber is an area the firm is keen to build out further.
There has been significant investment ploughed into the systems that underpin the way Focus delivers its services. For example, creating a more customer centric ServiceNow portal underpinned by automation and AI technologies.
Coupled with a track record of organic growth, Focus Group looks set to hit revenue of c.£300m. More than a third of this revenue is derived from the fixed/hosting voice space, around a quarter from mobile and IT solutions, and the remainder from data, networking, and cloud. The firm has AI capabilities “in pockets”, but this is “scaling fast”, according to Hall.
