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COMPANY PROFILE Gradwell outlines strateg


Peter Gradwell, Founder and Managing Director of Gradwell, aims to significantly extend his reach deeper into the SME market. Here’s how...


future pathway to success would be aligned to selling products. He then registered his company in 1998, offering email and website hosting to small businesses across the UK. In 2002, using open source software, Gradwell developed an in- house Internet telephony platform and hasn’t looked back since. “We wanted a Bath phone number which could be answered by a colleague in Leeds and Tunbridge Wells,” recalls Gradwell. “We couldn’t buy it so we built it. This allowed our telephony to be hosted on the Internet rather than in a physical location. The new platform meant that the same phone number could ring in different physical locations, without the need for costly redirection services. The service was developed further, and in 2004 it had matured enough to be offered to our existing customer base. In doing so, we enabled UK SMEs to easily create remote offices, facilitated home working and reduced call costs.”


F


It was in 2005, as turnover reached £176,000, that Gradwell opened an office


ollowing a spell developing websites at university Gradwell decided that his


in Bath. Later that year he developed a channel scheme so other businesses could provide Gradwell VoIP services to their own customer base. Then, in 2008 Gradwell became a partner with Tiscali Wholesale (later to become TalkTalk Business), adding business grade broadband to the service portfolio. The broadband service was designed to prioritise voice traffic and therefore complement the VoIP service range. “Our main USP is that the products and services we develop tend to be born out of problems we have experienced ourselves as a small business,” noted Gradwell. “In identifying and building our own solutions to real-world issues we can be confident that our offer is genuinely relevant to the market.”


Gradwell’s figures also add up. Between 2006-2010 the firm’s turnover increased 652 per cent to £4.067 million. Gradwell is currently on target to hit around £5 million for this financial year. The company has featured in the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 (the 50 fastest growing UK tech companies) for the last two years running. Gradwell has also seen the number of employees rise tenfold from five in 2005


very strong all the way up until 2008, the market lost 600,000 lines in 2009/2010, which we have seen migrate to SIP trunking. It is estimated that the uptake of VoIP will accelerate over the next two years from 0.6 million to 2.4 million subscribers. We are in an excellent position to leverage this opportunity working with our 200-plus partner base.”


Peter Gradwell


We are confident in our ability to grow


to over 50 in 2011. “We are confident in our ability to grow,” stated Gradwell. “In the past year we’ve seen strong interest in our core market from SMEs who want to increase flexibility and cut costs. Our partners are becoming more confident in the market and many are now actively looking to expand their business and secure more customers. In terms of numbers, we’re planning to maintain our 25-33 percentage growth in the next financial year and are aiming to more


than double our customer base from 16,000-plus to 40,000 and become a £15-20 million business in three-four years time.”


Growth opportunity The drop in the number of fixed landline subscribers, alongside the maturity and increased reliability of the VoIP market is a significant growth opportunity for Gradwell. He noted: “Looking at Ofcom’s latest Communications Market Review, we can see that whereas ISDN 30 sales were


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Gradwell says that his product and service offering is closely aligned to the way in which businesses, particularly SMEs, want to work. “For example, in relation to our voice offer we work in the sub-50 employee space, where current concerns revolve around developing smarter ways of working and, of course, delivering cost savings,” he commented. “Gradwell One, for instance, allows office-based users to keep in touch with mobile or remote workers using a single number. The service offers businesses a complete phone system that integrates all the traditional functionality associated with the hosted office PBX with mobile technology, enabling a consistent single view of the status of colleagues across mobile, desktop phone and computer-based softphone. In a nutshell,


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