Interviews
Interviews
The UK’s fastest growing private companies: Hot 100 2015 – (81) Softcat
2 min read
26 June 2015
The consistent Softcat has made the Hot 100 yet again and, while it has dropped from last year's position of 58, the IT reseller is still going strong.
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Name: Softcat
Industry/Sector: IT, software and telecoms
Date founded: 1993
The boss: Colin Brown
Location: South East
Latest turnover: £504.8m
Three-year compound growth rate (%): 32.05
Latest EBITDA: £37.3m
Since switching its headquarters to Marlow, Buckinghamshire in 2006, the IT infrastructure provider has just kept growing. It opened a further three offices in London, Manchester and Bristol as well as one in Leeds in late 2014.
The company provides IT sourcing, designing, delivering and supporting, and has a wide remit – tackling small to very complex IT solutions depending on customer needs. Clients have included New College Nottingham, which asked Softcat to help enhance ICT services across the board, cloud services provider Extrinsica Global and online poker site PokerStars.com – with its aim to keep ahead of the game in delivering reliable security to safeguard players.
Billing itself as providing “outstanding customer service” and being “passionate” about employee satisfaction, the company has focused on the latter, with previous awards including the Sunday Times No.1 Best Small Company to Work For 2010 and inclusion in the UK Best Workplaces 2015.
The company’s website said impressive employee satisfaction drives excellent customer service and its last customer satisfaction survey had over 99 per cent agree they were satisfied or very satisfied with Softcat as a company to do business with, marking the fourth year in a row to achieve over 99 per cent.
Another area of focus for the IT provider is corporate social responsibility, and it spreads efforts across charity work (raising over £1.2m since it started nominating an annual charity in 2007) and environmental work. There’s an internal “green team” to raise the agenda and awareness across the company – implementing efforts such as recycling tea bags for compost and running fuel-efficient pool cars for meetings. It works with an open plan office that it says reflects an “open culture”.