Conversations with... Vlad Nanu and Jamie Gibson of Amdaris

Vlad Nanu, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Jamie Gibson, Group Finance Director of Amdaris share with Pippa Clarke the company’s impressive story and exciting growth plans they have for the future.

Firstly, a huge well done for being shortlisted for the best tech company of the year (revenues over £5m) and the scale up award in the Tech South West Awards. Also, a particular well done to you Vlad for you and your Co-CEO Andy Rogers having both been shortlisted for the Entrepreneur of the Year. A massive achievement to have made it through to the finals! 

Firstly, lets start with a bit more about Amdaris… 

Thank you for the kind words, as a south west business it is important for us to be part of the Tech South West community. 

We started Amdaris 11 years ago in Bristol and we are a technology business providing software development services for our customers, globally. Most of our customers are in UK, but we also have customers in the US and Middle East as well. Over the past couple of years, we have been making in-roads into a more international focus. Around 18 months ago, we won a FTSE 250 oil and gas supplier, which was a major steppingstone for us to scale up our operations. In fact, this led to the opening of our Dubai entity. We now have four offices, Dubai, UK, Moldova, and Romania. The latter are where most of our operations are based, the heavy lifting is done here and it’s where our software development team sit. Dubai and UK operate as the strategy, sales and head office function.

As we have grown over the past few years, things have got more complex and we need more support from third parties such as accountants. But one thing that has changed materially over the past year has been the BGF investment that we have received. This has provided us with increased working capital, more financial interest from customers, confidence to do the right thing and the ability to progress and scale up our business organically at a growth rate of 30-40% per annum. The investment is all testament to the very strong business model that Vlad and Andy have developed over the past 10 years and we hope to accelerate going forward into the next 5 years.

And what about challenges that can arise when growing the business, are you able to talk about what you have found particularly challenging and how you tackle this?

It’s like raising a child, there are different challenges at different stages. What has been fascinating is that you think, right we need to pass this stage of development and then everything will be great but in reality, you have other challenges to overcome. Unlike other start ups who relying heavily on investment money, we have had the luxury of being profitable from the start. However, as we scale up, go international, open new centres, engage with new customers and as competition grows then our processes and approach must change. I always say to the team, I don’t want to say, “let’s try to mature the business”, that’s not true, the business does not mature it just improves all the time. There are continuous improvements and changes. 
 

And Jamie with regards to the financial challenges, do you have any thoughts on this?

Some of the challenges are more simplistic, for example changes to our systems and processes to enable us to grow. For instance, as we do more revenue, we issue more invoices, last year we issued 25 invoices on working day 1, and now we issue around 50 invoices on working day 1. Just minor things like that requiring thought, processes, and inputs to being able to use our own internal systems and having automated flows for invoicing. There are several micro issues however, there are also macro issues such as, we have scaled up marketing and sales which means we are now getting a lot of orders. The next headache is we need to scale up our recruitment to ensure that we can deploy staff immediately when we win orders, and we need the delivery functions perfectly humming. These are good problems for us to have! 

We always say that we add a lot of value to our customers, this is not a low-cost operation, this is a high value input to our customer and clients, we want to engage with them long term. They might have contracted to a 3-6 month service, but we want to show them in that time how important it is to have us on board so that we can supply, extend, and renew the services with them. We can use that as a basis for the type of customers we win. 

Really interesting and it sounds like you have clear plans for the future?

We have very clear plans, and over the next 5 years we have some aggressive plans to implement. This year was bumpy for everybody, but we are still going to show some very strong growth numbers. We got investment as the pandemic kicked off, which wasn’t related, we always planned to get the investment to enable us to scale up, but that has given us confidence. Firstly, that we have worked through a pandemic and come out stronger than we went into it, and also that we now have the BGF investment behind us to realise our goals. 

BGF have invested in Amdaris for two key reasons. They see important value in the business; it’s high growth, profit making, and we have a good cash flow. There is also good value to expand the business organically, at a rate of 30-40% a year (if we do that over two years, then it effectively doubles our business). Having that investment gives us the confidence to do the right thing in terms of marketing and sales. The second strand that BGF has done is something called a buy and build, so we can look at potential acquisitions, which we are doing at the moment, to see what is out there that could complement us. That could be anything from opening another centre in eastern Europe or a software house that fits naturally in terms of providing other skill sets, whether that’s consultancy skillsets or a company that has links in to potential blue chip companies.

The future is bright, we look forward to achieving our goals. Even before our investment we knew where we had to get to, so hopefully this will just accelerate our journey. I just wish every day was longer so we could achieve more! 

And finally, if you were to give any advice to anyone who is starting out, or scaling up what would it be?

Business (and life) goes up and down, the same applies to your challenges, some days are great, some days aren’t. The line always goes up though, so my advice is never give up, just keep working towards the destination. It doesn’t matter if some days are bad, on average it’s always good and positive!

Also, have a sense of humour! The most important thing is to be able to understand and have emotional intelligence with your colleagues, customers and clients. You need to work with, and partner with them to be able to build relationships. It’s important that everyone is seen as part of the team, especially with the growth and pressures that we have – you need emotion and humour at the end of the day. The lockdown has brought this to the forefront, thinking about what value the office has. The longer we have been locked down, the more we can see that yes working from home has its advantages sometimes, but it’s important to be in the office. A whiteboard session, strategy discussions, talking to each other, debating and deciding on a way forward is much more effective face-to-face than via Teams or Skype. Videoconferencing has its place but it’s difficult to build a rapport and lacks the necessary human interaction. Generally, our advice would be to aim high, don’t give up and have fun along the way!