An IT services and solutions company has set its sights on hitting a turnover of £10m within three years after growing by 50% over the past 12 months, moving office and taking on more staff.
Mintivo relocated from the centre of Chippenham to the edge of nearby National Trust village of Lacock last year and placed heavy emphasis on building the right culture among staff.
It even opened its own employees’ pub, ‘The Minchester’, within the new office.
The Gold Microsoft partner offers managed IT support, consultancy, cyber security and business intelligence to a customer base that includes Good Energy, Investors in People, Dorothy House Hospice Care Business Cyber Centre and the Ministry of Defence.
While these are primarily based in the South West, it is increasingly winning more business nationally.
Last year Mintivo’s turnover leapt from £1.4m to £2.1m while it also made seven appointments to keep pace with its increase in customers. It is now aiming to grow another 43% this year.
Managing director Chris Gough, who co-founded the firm in 2018 after working for upmarket fashion label Mulberry and as a freelance IT consultant, expects to recruit at least 10 more people before the end of the year.
He said: “We are winning at least one new customer each month so we just need more people.
“We’ve spent three years investing in policy and process and now everything is in place to grow into a £10m company.”
“We aren’t going to get there 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.”
Chris said the firm had spent the past three years honing its processes and winning accreditations, such as Cyber Essentials+, ISO9001 and ISO27001, as well as adopting ITIL customer service management standards.
Meanwhile, the pandemic was a catalyst for businesses to look again at the way they work, which 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 10 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.
“We also have our training suite, the Mintivo Academy, and we put a lot of effort into making this a great place to work.”
Among the new appointments are head of business development Andrew James, senior solutions architect Henry Lavender and infrastructure team lead Nickey Sharp.
Mintivo operations director Mark Adams said: “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.
“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.”
Pictured: Mintivo managing director Chris Gough, centre, flanked by its most recent new starters – head of business development Andrew James, left, IT support engineers Toby Newton-Shaw and Robin D’Souza, senior solutions architect Harry Lavender, service desk analyst Madelief Boon, IT support engineer Andrew Pym and infrastructure team lead Nickey Sharp
