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The Interview
PHIL HOLLINGDALE Founder & CEO of
SimplyBiz, a provider of comprehensive compliance and business support to over 5000 financial advisers throughout the UK, recently acquired a majority stake in Staffcare, a SaaS (software as a service) provider based in Surrey. Staffcare’s CEO, Phil Hollingdale spoke to Finance Monthly to expand upon the reasons behind this major acquisition and to detail what it means for the company.
P
hil Hollingdale is both the Founder & CEO of Staffcare Limited, an employee benefits software company. He has been selling business to business technology since 1977; “A time when disruptive
technology was an electronic typewriter that could store a few lines of text with auto error correction facilities replacing the need to use Tippex.”
What more can you tell us about your professional background?
I didn’t get any meaningful qualifications as I left school at 16 and went straight into work. I had a short stint in a Bank but soon decided that wasn’t a career I wanted to pursue, so I applied for a job as a trainee office equipment salesman with a local company. Prospecting for business in those days meant physically knocking on doors of office blocks in the centre of towns and in industrial estates and trying to get in front of the office manager to show them the latest typewriters and dictation products. It was good grounding and it taught me that to be successful in sales it was a numbers game coupled with a good product targeted at the right people in a personable way. My second job in technology was with Xerox when they launched their typewriter products.
regard that period as my time at the “University of Selling”.
I followed technology trends moving from typewriters to word processors, PCs, software, the internet and now cloud computing. I set up my first business in 1986, aged 24, as a reseller of Wang computers. We were their biggest dealer in the UK and enjoyed four years of rapid growth which came to a grinding halt when Wang went into Chapter 11. I sold the business to my business partner and moved into software having secured the rights to a product which had been developed for a firm of financial advisers to deal with policy tracking and commission reconciliation. I sold that business to Data Sciences, now part of IBM, and bought it back 4 years later, merged it with another business and sold it a year later. At that time there was a lot of noise about the internet and e-commerce so I set up a web design business, Screen Pages, specialising in building websites for independent financial advisers (IFAs) and online shopping sites for multi-channel retailers. Matalan, Fat Face and FCUK were amongst our clients as well as Kate Middleton’s parents with their Party Pieces mail order business. It was an exciting time dealing with business owners and helping them launch their businesses online.
What can you tell us about Staffcare? I
Staffcare started as a product idea in 2002 when we saw an emerging trend for IFAs to publish information about group pension schemes through their websites so that employees could go online to access information about their company pension
and other benefits. After a soft launch and with a proven revenue model, in 2004 I decided to spin- out Staffcare from Screen Pages and set it up as a standalone business. To fund development and initial marketing costs I went fund raising and in early 2005 I secured investment from an angel investor and then shortly afterwards from Venture Capital. It was the first time I had run a business with external funding and despite the many horror stories you hear about business owners losing control to their funders I had a very good experience and would do the same again. Having raised the finance I decided that I should focus 100% on Staffcare and so I sold Screen Pages.
Our business model was, and continues to be, to sell the software through IFAs and Employee Benefit Consultants (EBCs) who sell it as part of a broader proposition.
It’s a licensing model which generates
recurring subscription revenue based on the number of employees and group pension members loaded onto our platform.
For a few years we burnt a lot
of cash as investment in product development far exceeded the income being generated. Today we are cash positive with about 70% of revenues being recurring with a projected compound average growth rate of c:30% over the next 3 years.
Based in modern offices in Leatherhead, Surrey, we have a team of around 55 people, plus we have an offshore development team in Poland which we can scale up or down to support different projects