“How do I fund all the projects my business needs to do to be successful, with my current limited resources?”
Like most SME business owners, Christopher Lydiard-Wilson, CEO of an energy SaaS company, had to balance ambitious growth plans with a limited budget.
By unlocking the power of offshoring, Christopher was able to scale far faster than his competitors. Offshoring turned EnergyQuote JHA into a leading global energy services provider, and ultimately, a valuable exit to Accenture in 2015.
Teams in Romania and Bangalore enabled its founders to extract a far higher valuation without the need for equity dilution or debilitating debt.
Cost savings was a key consideration, but in fact 5 times more value was realised from their offshore teams, in areas not at all evident at the beginning of their scaling journey.
This experience led Christopher Lydiard-Wilson and his co-founder, Charles Fenton (former International Director at EnergyQuote), to found Potentiam, a company to help SMEs achieve transformational growth by building offshore capabilities.
The trigger to move offshore
By the point of acquisition by Accenture in 2015, EnergyQuote JHA had 300 staff globally, a world-beating technology platform and 650 global client corporations.
However, back In 2005, EnergyQuote JHA was a UK consultancy of 80 staff facing significant challenges:
- A rapidly saturating UK market
- An aging tech platform with limited scope
- An increasingly expensive work force versus newer lower cost competitors.
Charles Fenton – responsible for growing EnergyQuote internationally – asked: “How could we expand outside our core UK services without escalating costs? This was not just a cost challenge but a significant senior management capacity bottle neck.”
Christopher reckoned, “To do everything we wanted with the business, we needed 4 times the capital we had available. We had to prioritise. This meant forgoing many of our more innovative projects because of budget limitations. We had no choice but focus on BAU, but this did not solve our long-term issues.”
EnergyQuote looked at alternatives for delivering growth. Neither debt nor equity dilution were ideal. But, they discovered a third way: offshoring.
This article is part one of a six-part series. Next, we will look at how offshoring resulted in a 30% increase in productivity in the first month.
The other parts of this story are:
Building a World-Class Technology Team: The Offshoring vs Outsourcing Dilemma - Part 3 of 6
