Going from zero to over 100 staff inside four years, acquisitive MSP Flotek topped Fast-Growth 50 2026.
In this special interview, Founder and CEO Jay Ball opens up on his long-term ambitions, how he is bringing a telecoms mentality to the IT space, and which competitors he respects the most…
Fast-Growth 50 highlights some of the UK’s fastest-growing MSPs, MSSPs, resellers and consultancies by headcount. Download it for free here (IT Channel Oxygen members only).
What’s the biggest misconception about Flotek?
That we’re just an M&A builder – our peers will often comment on the fact we’ve had this fast growth and associate it only with M&A.
But we do 20 to 25 new logos a month at a time when everybody’s telling me nobody’s winning new business. We’re winning shed loads of business – our organic growth was 43% last year and whilst we expect that to reduce as we grow, we want to remain a market leader in this.
You launched Flotek in January 2022. What was the rationale?
I was 21 when I set up a business called Datakom, and built it to £5m revenue and £1.5m EBITDA. SCG [Southern Communications Group] came in and bought the business and initially the plan was for me to join the board in a senior role and be a key part of the future leadership team which was hugely exciting.
I stayed on for a year and a half, and whilst the exposure to their M&A engine was a great experience I really didn’t like being part of a large corporate and felt I lost my entrepreneurial spark, irrespective of how I could benefit financially.
So I retured when I was 35 and went to live in Cyprus, but after a year I got really bored and realised I wasn’t ready to retire. I strongly felt there was a massive gap in the UK where comms and IT just weren’t joined up.
You founded Flotek with Malcolm Holland and David Middleton. What was your original ambition?
We initially had a plan to get to £20m revenue and £4m EBITDA in ten years through M&A and organic growth, building a really strong and high-quality business then look at exiting.
Four years on, where are you on that plan?
We initially acquired more businesses than we originally thought by agreeing an initial debt facility which means we grew to £12m within 18 months – and all of a sudden our original goal didn’t feel ambitious enough.
We still have our 10-year plan but now we’re aiming for £100m, which is 30% growth per year. What’s most important to us though is keeping strong with our fundamentals and growing a really high quality business, so if we achieve that but fall short I think we can still look at it as a success.
I also don’t think I’ll ever fully retire.
What is Flotek’s business model?
We run our IT and comms teams as two separate desks. You’re not trying to get IT people to fix broadband issues or phone system issues, which they absolutely hate, and vice versa.
As a business, we’re 60% IT and 40% comms, and we want to keep that going. I much prefer IT, but comms is just a natural thing.
Megabuyte didn’t believe our organic growth until we showed them the figures. We’ve got an absolutely killer sales funnel, which is my passion.
We’ve got a really good tech stack. We’ve simplified the model.
We’re not like most IT companies, where you look at a menu and you’ve got to pick 20 things off it. We have two IT plans where it bundles it all together. We took a telecoms approach into the IT world, and just made it really simple. And that was our USP – don’t over-complicate it.
You’ve done 15 acquisitions to date. Will the cadence of M&A slow?
We aim to do two to four acquisitions a year, broadly 15% of our revenue, this year will likely be towards the end of the year and have a goal to reach a £23m run rate in 2026. We are currently funding our acquisitions from cash flow and have a really modest level of debt, so the next objective is to raise a larger fund to facilitate our plan for the next few years.
Who else in the industry do you respect?
The only business I would say I look up to is Focus Group.
I’ve known [Focus Group co-founder] Ralph [Gilbert] for many years, and he’s a such a lovely person.
They’re obviously comms, really, but are trying their hardest to transform into IT. I think they’ve got an uphill battle to do that, because they’re just so big.
But they’ve got the sales engine right. They got the product right. They’ve got the principles right.
There are lots of companies out there trying to build their own telephony platform, or RMM, and it’s just silly, because all you’re doing is wasting time. Focus took the attitude of, ‘we’re not a technology builder; what we are is an enabler with a sales engine’. And I respect that.
What market trend is top of your radar as an MSP leader?
The easy answer is AI. But I want to give you a better story. For me, it’s the sovereign cloud story. We bought a hosted desktop business last April. I could see everyone went to the hyperscalers, and they’re now starting to come back on premise.
It’s not the sexiest thing, but I find it really quite exciting that we’ve got our own team managing our own stack, and I think that will be a real growth curve for the next year or two.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
