28 entrepreneurs Backing a winner
At the age of 28, Max McNeill turned his back on a glamorous life in Las Vegas to set up his own technology company, selling memory products. In the 22 years since then, he has grown and evolved Ultima Business Solutions into one of the UK’s leading IT infrastructure partners. This year, its turnover is expected to exceed £80 million, and headcount will exceed 300. But McNeill has not only built a booming business – thanks to the success of Ultima he has also made a name for himself in the horse racing world. McNeill told Eleanor Harris how his business and racing are inextricably linked, and why he’ll never sell Ultima
Max McNeill is founder and chairman of Ultima Business Solutions, based in Reading. He was born in 1962 in Blackburn, Lancashire, and moved around the country during his education, before gaining a HND in business studies. He moved to the south east in 1983 with a view to becoming an accountant, but decided it wasn’t the career for him and moved into IT sales, working for Digital, Rapid Recall, and then Digital again, having been headhunted back, before founding Ultima in 1990. Today, Ultima has 280 employees and achieved turnover of £67m to March 31, 2012. The independent company provides IT solutions and services – ranging from remote management to licensing – to private and public sector clients, which include The Daily Telegraph and Tarmac. Among its many technical awards, Ultima is a seven times Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. McNeill owns eight race horses, including Walkon, Grumeti and Handazan. Ultima is also a major jump racing sponsor, sponsoring races at Cheltenham Festival and Newbury as well as leading trainer Alan King’s yard. McNeill is married with two children, lives in Sonning, Berkshire, and supports Blackburn Rovers.
From there, how did the company grow and evolve?
Why and how did you set up the business? What was the inspiration?
I always wanted to work for myself, build a company of my own and make some money. In 1990, the timing was right. I was 28, single, I’d got a good background in IT sales and I saw an opportunity with a friend to set up a business selling memory products. Instead of supplying the manufacturers’ own memory, we’d supply third- party memory, which was significantly cheaper. We saw a niche for doing that. At the same time, Digital, a big American corporation, had offered me a job in Las Vegas, and it was one of those crossroads: Las Vegas sounded quite appealing to a 28-year-old, but I really believed in this business, and I wanted to work on my own. I didn’t have any money, I was always in an overdraft position, but I needed to put in £5000 to set it up. I was at a wedding with one of my best old school friends and I told his father about my plans and he lent me the £5000 – without that, I probably wouldn’t have done it. For six years I halved my salary and worked all hours, but within the first six months we had already sold loads of memory and were booming.
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We were just selling components for the first two years and then started selling PCs and systems, but we realised we had to get into other things and offer more than just product. We quickly identified that selling services was the way forward, so we invested in technical people and building up our services business. When we moved to our current offices in 1997 and the costs went up overnight, it was a wake-up call to speed up that process and take the business to the next level, and that took us from being a “mid-teens” organisation to one turning over more than £20m. From there, we went through the dot-com boom and decided to get into remote management and set up our own 24 x 7 technical support centre. The objective was to build up a stream of business with annually recurring revenue, as well as helping to develop longer term contracts with customers. So, we’re not just a reseller, we build long-term relationships with our customers and offer them support, services, skills and knowledge. We got into managed services very early, making significant investments, and over the 22 years, that’s been our strategy, constantly looking for new opportunities to reinvest our profits. That’s how we have got to where we are today.
Is that how you would account for your success overall?
There are two things: one is nurturing the long- term relationships with our customers, but the most important thing here is people. There are over 90 people who have been here for 10 years or more, some for 20 years. We’re a people-driven business, we look after them, we motivate them, we give them a career path, we’re ambitious, we try to run it in a sensible way, while our strategy is to grow organically. Recently there’s been a
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – NOVEMBER 2012
lot of consolidation in our marketplace, where companies like Ultima are being taken over. The problem with so many acquistions, however, is insufficient thought is given to culture conflicts with an increased risk of losing your number one asset, your staff. We have certainly been able to benefit from this situation and have been able to offer top-notch consultants and sales people a stable and supportive environment in which to progress and develop. We’ve been very successful in this regard, and that has contributed significantly to our growth over the last few years: our turnover was mid-£40m; this year we’re heading for over £80m. And our headcount two years ago was less than 220; at the end of this year it will be over 300.
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