Boldon James
Culture change, sales & marketing function renewal, proposition transformation and £20m trade sale to QinetiQ
In 2006 Boldon James was a recently MBO’d software development organisation, with a single Email security product aimed at security agencies across Commonwealth nations.
So as to achieve suitable valuation for trade sale, sales growth was required alongside diversification into new markets. There existed a legacy revenue stream from connectivity products with which to fund an evolution of the company’s direction, which essentially had to focus on a move away from a development shop mentality alongside revitalising the product suite to adapt to evolving security requirements within the customer base as well as recognition of similar requirements in adjacent sectors.
Transformation Strategy:
Short term elevation of the value of the company's flagship product required selling a wider set of components directly to the end user organisation. This required creating a Military Message Handling Solution (MMHS) set proposition involving best of breed ISV partners to wrap around the company's core component. Supporting the customers with security & business process workshops allowed Boldon James to set the agenda and distil requirements around their Microsoft based solution. MMHS created a much bigger value profile in the marketplace as well as significantly increasing deal sizes from low £100k’s into the multi £m’s, albeit at a reduced revenue margin ratio.
Accelerating revenue growth and EBIT in the medium term required a fundamental change to key drivers such as development philosophy, product line and value based price achieved. To this end a new set of products was created that extended security IP from Email across other Microsoft conferencing and collaboration products. This was in recognition of requirements that customers had for security across other forms of communication such as voice and video, Instant Messaging and office documents. A new market definition for this set of security requirements was created, namely Secure Inormation Exchange (SIE) and heavily associated with Boldon James. Microsoft also supported our evolution due to the close alignment with their Unified Communications strategy and the fact that our SIE security was accelerating large enterprise sales for their new products.
To achieve the above, a number of iterative rebranding and messaging initiatives were realised through the sales force, events, industry forums and the web-site.
Trade sale achieved to QinetiQ for £20m in October 2007, yielding a 3.11x multiple and a 69.5% IRR ISIS Equity Partners.