INTERVIEW


From bedroom to boardroom


Entrepreneur Brett Critchley has come a long way since setting up Orchid IT in his bedroom as a 21-year-old. He spoke to Business Network Editor Nathan Fearn about the evolution of technology and why PKF Cooper Parry, for which he is a partner, is at the heart of the conversation.


Not everybody will have a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment in their life but that’s certainly what happened to Nottinghamshire-born Brett Critchley back in December 1996. At 21, Brett had been working for an IT company in a role


that, by his own admission, he wasn’t particularly enjoying. What happened next would change the whole


complexion of his career. “I was working for a big IT company and didn’t agree


with the way they were doing things – the customer service was bad, the way they were buying stuff was bad and how they were selling stuff was bad,” he explains. “My old boss was a bit of a bully and one day he challenged me, suggesting that I wasn’t capable of doing what he did and saying that if I thought otherwise I should go off and do it.” Having had the gauntlet thrown down in front of him,


Brett set to work doing just that and the results were both dramatic and almost instantaneous, resulting in a technology-based, customer-centric career that he has never looked back from. “I rang my clients and asked if they would buy off me if I


went it alone and worked from my bedroom, they said yes. I rang my suppliers and they were happy to sell to me also. In those days there were no contracts, so anybody could do anything. “I started on my own and the first order was for £10,000,


selling some PCs. I bought them in, boxed them up at my house, shipped them out and made £500 on it. I went on to turn over £1m in the first year. It was pretty immense.” Despite Brett’s clear entrepreneurial ability, owning his


own business – or even working in digital technology – was not something that had always been on the radar. “I never had any intention of starting my own business. I


wanted to do something better than what other people were doing and I just thought there was a better way of doing it,” says Brett. “It just happened to be tech. I’ve never been a techy


person to be honest, my main interest has always been in the customer services element of business and making people happy because what you’re offering them works. “It isn’t rocket science. You do a good job, word gets


out, you’re in greater demand and you then have to start thinking about bringing in extra people and you start to grow.” And growth is something that Orchid IT delivered in


spades, with Brett finally selling the company, which by then was turning over £10m, in 2011 - a decision, Brett believes, that was all about the timing. “There were a couple of factors that resulted in the sale.


For one, the IT landscape was changing a lot. Cloud computing was really starting to take off and I could see a decline in the business we were doing and the shift to Cloud was quite nerve-racking at the time.


34 business network December 2017/January 2018 PKF Cooper Parry's offices are incredibly employee-centric “Also, I met a guy at a car racing event one day who told me


he wanted to buy my business. I told him it wasn’t for sale but when he told me how much he was willing to pay, it didn’t take me long to reconsider. It all came about at the right time.” However, rather than basking in what is clearly an


impressive success story, Brett is adamant that the difficult times he experienced are of equal significance, helping to shape his career to this day. “There were a lot of mistakes along the way and I got


plenty of things wrong,” admits Brett. “For example, we put in the voting system in Baghdad


when they pulled Saddam Hussein’s statue down and we had to get paid in sacks of cash - £250,000 worth of cash. “I think also, having started the business at such a young


age with no real business grounding, what I know now compared to what I knew then is just massively different. At PKF Cooper Parry, for instance, we have grown ten-fold in the IT department in three years but that’s mainly because we have learned from the mistakes that I made in the 15 years at Orchid and I won’t repeat those mistakes again. That’s not to say everything is perfect now, but you definitely learn. “We had Global Entrepreneurs Week recently and we did


talks to students, telling them those types of real life stories and encouraging them not to be afraid of things that will come and challenge you.” In his current role, Brett heads up the IT team at PKF


Cooper Parry, itself a multi-award-winning and multi- faceted business advisory service recently ranked 32nd in the UK in the Sunday Times’ 100 Best Companies to Work For 2017.


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