Forge Technologies took top spot in this year’s Oxygen Fast-Growth 50 after growing from zero to 41 staff inside four years.
Find out more about the Fast-Growth 50 here.
Here we catch up with the London-based Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix and Fortinet partner’s CEO Jason Osmond…
Hi Jason. How did Forge start life?
The idea came during the first lockdown in 2020, and we officially launched during the summer of the next year. Myself and the two other co-founders – [COO] Jeremy Humphrey and [CCO] Sam Simpson – have all been involved in both scale-ups that have gone on to exit and in some cases larger, more corporate organisations. After forming we were swiftly joined by our CTO, Martin Chapman.
I’d just exited Cancom after selling Ocean to them in 2018, and Sam had just left Roc. We got together with Jeremy and said, ‘given our time again, what would we do differently’?
We concluded there was a gap in the market for an IT services and managed services business which focused on mid to enterprise clients but was still agile enough to deliver services the larger, more unwieldy organisations couldn’t. I’d put into that bracket the likes of Logicalis, Computacenter, Capita and Softcat.
Enterprise clients told us they needed people with the battle scars. They needed subject matter experts with pedigree. But they also wanted them to move a little bit faster.
We said, ‘well, we know a hell of a lot of these people out in the market’. We knew the subject matter experts that had risen to the top at those larger organisations, but from a technical perspective had got disillusioned because they were behind a desk pushing spreadsheets around.
We’ve attracted those types of people back into our organisation. They can be deployed into those enterprise accounts to give their expertise, but in a much pacier way than our competitors.
That’s been the formula for building Forge – getting the right people into the business and then in front of the right clients.
What’s your technology or vendor sweet spot?
We’ve got some four technology pillars. There’s a digital app and innovation practice that’s centred around Microsoft from an automation and AI perspective, and then a cloud practice that’s well and truly pinned to Microsoft Azure. We’ve then got networking, which is Fortinet and Cisco, and workplace, which is Microsoft and Citrix.
You’ve gone from one to four to 12 to 41 staff in your first four sets of accounts. Has that growth all been organic?
We had a small acquisition at the beginning of 2024 and that added eight people to that number.
Where is Forge heading?
It’s about becoming the go-to partner in the UK for midmarket-to-enterprise managed services and digital transformation.
Our target is to double [sales] each year, year on year. We think that’s pretty ambitious in the current economic climate and also without a load of M&A.
Unlike a lot of the other start-ups in this space, we’ve also focused on building the business in the right way from the start. A business of our age typically wouldn’t have gone through a triple ISO range of certifications, which we have. That gives our customers confidence.
We’ve not borrowed a penny from anybody during this journey and don’t even have an overdraft. We’ve invested profits back into the business to enable the next set of growth. That’s enabled by our focus on building long-term relationships, and we therefore have strong annuity contracts with our clients. At the moment 70% is annuity, which gives us a really good foundation for forward growth.
Who are the Fast-Growth 50?
Find out more here.
