Hi Graham. What figure from the results most pleased you?
We’ve just got our latest customer NPS number, which is 64. That’s the one that matters. It’s nice to see gross invoiced income up at £3.6bn as that is a measure of scale and a great way of seeing how we’ve grown. But customer NPS, employee NPS, those are the numbers that feed into everything else.
In your results commentary, you dropped a strong hint that you want to make further acquisitions (following your maiden swoop on Oakland in April). How likely is it that you will make another one in the next 12 months.
The approach for us on M&A hasn’t changed. We’ve done the opening deal this year because we found something compelling.
There are two routes. One is capability, and Oakland was in the capability bit. It adds to the offering, so that’s great.
But we could also do geographic. If we do geographic, it’s going be in the US. The US office is 20 people. It’s a mixture of local hires and tenured Softcat exports, so the culture we’ve built out in the US is as vibrant as anything we’ve got in the UK. We’ve made a great start there, and we’ve got the branches elsewhere as well.
Internationally, we think about our business in four ways now: the UK, where we’ve still got unbelievable headroom for growth. We’ll crack on with the UK as we always have.
We’ve made a great start in Ireland. We’ve been there four or five years now and are committed to Ireland for the long term. We’ll keep organically building there and I think we can aim to be the biggest in that market one day.
Then the US. We’re not selling to local customers there yet. We’re fulfilling and doing a lot of work for UK and Irish multinational there. But we could accelerate that capability and start to sell to local customers if we bought something.
But it would have to fit the same model as Oakland, which is first and foremost a management team that genuinely cares about their people and has a similar ethos to ours, and who wanted to join Softcat and could see why we’d be the right owner for them.
I think we could be a terrific owner for a business like that in the States.
If, and only if, we see that kind of thing, we’ve got the firepower and ambition to act on it. But if we don’t see it, we don’t need to do it either – we’ve got more than enough growth opportunities because alongside UK, Ireland and the US we’ll keep investing in that rest-of-world branch capability as well.
The headroom we’ve got for our UK and Irish customers to grow globally is vast, but the US is interesting to us for sure.
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