Edotech founder thinks big with £100m target for outsourced scanning firm

Ferguson is adamant he does not want to “just go back in and create another Edotech”. That said, there are similarities between his current and former companies. The service offerings of both are – though complementary – markedly different. Where Edotech was “massive on the paper side”, creating around 40m bills a month, EDM takes that paper and turns it back into digital files. It runs five sites and specialises in bulk scanning of inbound mail for a range of clients. However, the business drivers in both cases are identical.

“When we launched Edotech, there was a need for a quality supplier in the marketplace to provide outsourced print services to the banks,” says Ferguson. “Now times have changed. There are opportunities at this end of the market that are similar to what used to exist in transactional print. The market needs a single credible supplier that large companies will feel comfortable outsourcing to.”

It is Ferguson’s goal to become that credible supplier and, if his track record is anything to go by, one would be a fool not to back him. Not only does he have experience of the supplier side of the equation, but his background in finance led him to consult in the City during his two-year break, a fact that may prove advantageous now he’s back on the other side of the fence. “You get to know from working in finance institutions what makes it easy for them to do business with you,” he says.

Same sector, same strategy, different company. Although, in another regard, Ferguson is keeping much the same company as before, having been joined at EDM by his former Edotech partners Kevin Ord and Lynn Broadbent. The pair are now EDM’s operations and technical services directors respectively. Since being reunited, the three have set about ruthlessly repositioning the company to focus more on the big corporate clients who will take its turnover to the £100m mark, which is the firm’s ultimate goal.

Changing direction
“EDM was fundamentally a good business with good customers, but the business direction was geared towards bringing in more and more volume scanning, whereas I believed there was more value in our ability to provide technology-based solutions to the scanning world,” says Ferguson.

In the 12 months since he took charge, EDM has shed more than 300 clients, who between them were contributing a mere £1.2m of turnover. “We had too many very small customers,” says Ferguson. “We were billing around 700 customers a year. Now it’s down to less than 400, which is still high, but better than where we were before. We’ve moved from the jobbing end of the market to the higher added-value end.”

The former Edotech team’s efforts are beginning to bear fruit, with big-name institutions, such as Companies House and the AA, cropping up among its burgeoning list of blue-chip clients. The limiting factor so far has been the firm’s main premises, which is much more suited to the jobbing end of the market it previously occupied.

Appearance counts
“We had to beef up security quite a bit and make sure we had FSA-standard protection and recovery procedures,” says Ferguson. “Even so, the appearance of the place is wholly inappropriate to the kind of company we’re trying to be.”

He’s not exaggerating. Ferguson’s office is, by chance, one of the few not to have water stains on the ceiling. Priority number one has been to move into a new site, which should happen next year. The second step will be to continue to grow the firm’s blue-chip client base, as well as its range of services.

A lot of the companies that outsourced their transactional print to Edotech still have fairly large in-house scanning facilities, because the importance of the work and the lack of any large players in the market made it difficult to outsource. This is something Ferguson is hoping to take advantage of. “We’re looking to provide either a facilities-managed, or a part facilities-managed, part-outsourced service. That’s a strong area for us to move into,” he says. “If you look more long term, we want to get into the complete end-to-end transactional print production of things like mortgages, pensions, ISAs and so on, to tie into data capture at the other side.”

In EDM, Ferguson seems to have found a company ideally suited to his talents and, while he clearly isn’t looking to create another Edotech, if one considers the rapid growth and success of his former firm, he might just hope history repeats itself.

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EDM FACTFILE
Founded 2004
Sites Wolverhampton, Poynton, Blackburn, Aldershot and Bristol
Staff 400
Turnover £16m
Clients Birmingham Midshires, Lloyds TSB Asset Finance, West Bromwich Building Society, Companies House, BUPA, DHL Express, The AA and Powergen
Services Scanning, online document hosting, archiving, scan on demand, facilities management, email room, workflow and print