COMPANY PROFILE Family business thrives o
UKFast began life as a family business and, most remarkably, the company’s founders have managed to maintain and nurture the ‘family ethos’ in what is now a £20-plus million operation with a headcount approaching 200. We got the story and strategic vision from Lawrence Jones, UKFast’s CEO.
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KFast was established by Lawrence and Gail Jones in
1999. Having experienced poor customer service from existing web hosting companies during an attempt to set up an online gallery, they saw a gap in the market for a provider with customer service and support at its core. From a back bedroom in Manchester the couple set about setting up UKFast, reading countless business and marketing books and learning about the complex technology involved in the Internet hosting process. From this two person venture, UKFast has grown to a £20-plus million turnover firm with around 180 employees and rising.
Company turnover in 2012 rose 25 per cent from £16 million in 2011 to £20 million at the end of last year. Predicted turnover for 2013 is an even more impressive £25 million. “We host more than 4,000 clients across 400,000 domains on our network,” stated Jones. “We
aim to be the largest and most profitable supplier of managed hosting solutions in the UK by 2020 and to have contributed in a major way to the goal of bringing innovation back to Britain.
“To achieve these objectives we will continue to pursue customer service excellence by investing in the personal and professional development of our employees. UKFast is a company passionate about employee engagement and, while some businesses are reluctant to spend time or money rewarding and looking after their staff, we know that employees who feel valued will go the extra mile to look after customers.”
Jones’ bold bid to bring innovation back to Britain involves the creation of new and revolutionary products based on the clever use of premium technology. “We intend to invest in the north west and build on the acquisition of a previously disused building for our new HQ, the UKFast Campus,” he added. “The move is a huge
Lawrence Jones
milestone for the business, giving us the space to expand further with plans to double the workforce by 2014. This building also has the space for us to develop MaNOC 8, our latest data centre. And because we have bought the building outright we have the freedom to develop it according to our plans.”
Jones also made the decision to implement the Google 20 per cent rule which sets aside 20 per cent of UKFast’s developers’ time to work on their own projects within the company. “Our R&D
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developers designed and built Orpheus, the internal system we use at UKFast,” added Jones. “Orpheus incorporates our telephone systems, accounts software, customer sales and technical databases, daily task management and diary systems, and our human resources software.”
Bought off-the-shelf this system would have cost an estimated £200,000, so as well as automating a number of administrative tasks the system has also saved the company a large amount of money which can be invested
in fresh innovations such as the firm’s new cloud product, the eCloud, claimed to be the largest highly available cloud in the UK. It uses best of breed technology including 3PAR and Cisco UCS blades and, according to Jones, it’s the first elastic cloud of its type in the UK.
“We are also in the process of developing and expanding the services that we can offer our channel partners to include support with press and social media strategy,” he added. “We help our partners to create
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