BestPath ranked 8th in Oxygen Fast-Growth 50 2026.
Nicholas Bridgeman explains its quirky approach to the networking space…
Download the full Fast-Growth 50 report here to see who made the cut.
How did BestPath begin?
James [Williamson] and I were working together as individual contractors at a client. We always had similar interests, and we’d worked together long before that. We’d known each other for a good 15 years. Then one day we were having a coffee and said, ‘let’s do it’.
We saw all the other partners not delivering to the standard we’d have done it if we were a company.
We saw that a lot of partners cared about the transaction, but nothing past that because they didn’t think from the perspective of an engineer.
We thought about what we’d want if we were the customer. I’d want my network to be stable. I don’t want to get called out at 3am. I’d want everything handed over nicely documented, and I’d want that warm, fuzzy feeling. And James and I just thought, no one else does that. We thought, and we still believe, we can do that a lot better than a lot of the other partners we see.
All of our work so far has been organic. We’ve only taken on salespeople in any anger in the past couple of years.
Does your focus beyond the transaction mean Cisco’s newly launched 360 plays to your strengths?
No, not so much. We have a really good relationship with Cisco. But we’ve always felt a bit of a poor relation in terms of how they see partners. Before 360, they always said they cared about partners who do services. But the reality is they only care about tin sales. If you’re not selling tin, you’re not really on their radar.
360 changes that a bit with the way we’ve been scored, but for us to get even more on the radar, we have to start transacting more.
People always say, ‘you’ve done this the wrong way around’.
A lot of partners start selling tin, and look to move into professional services. We started purely in professional services, and still now only do a small amount of tin – just as an avenue to push more professional services.
Do you agree that you did it the wrong way around?
No. We wouldn’t want to do it any other way. James and I were engineers by nature. We come from a consulting background.
That’s where our strengths are.
Tin sales can be challenging – there’s not a huge mark up in it. It can sometimes be a lot of work for little gain. If we never sold any tin, we wouldn’t be that bothered. But we have to, just to have a seat at the table with customers. It’s a necessary evil.
What’s BestPath’s customer and technology sweet spot?
The vendors are very mixed, but it’s predominantly Cisco and Arista, and then some of the security guys like Fortinet, Palo Alto, Juniper, and a bit of NVIDIA.
A lot of our work is financial, but that’s more through luck than judgment – but financial clients generally have the biggest datacentres and biggest budgets.
We’ve always had two avenues.
One is through larger partners who probably care more about tin sales than services. Often, larger partners will go and sell tin, not be able to deliver a solution, and then we come in and wrap up the design, do the build, do the implementation and do the handover.
And then the other avenue is direct clients, where we are much more in control of our own destiny.
Our sweet spot is much more the SME market, rather than the largest enterprises. It’s a shorter buying cycle, less politics, less red tape, and we can influence things a bit more. programme plays into your hands?
What are your long-term ambitions for BestPath?
We’ve not thought about exit strategies.
At the minute, it’s just pure customer acquisition and retaining the value as we grow. All we want to do is grow the reputation, the brand and the customer base.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
