Daisy Group’s Founder and Executive Chairman, Matthew Riley, is an acquisition-hungry entrepreneur from a telecommunications background. While its current CEO, Neil Muller, is a bright young IT professional with experience leading large companies that have enjoyed organic growth. It is the meeting of these two minds that has established a dynamic and driven company that will not settle.
Connecting the dots between business ideas and technology
Daisy is now the UK’s largest independent digital provider of end-to-end business communications and managed services solutions, with 60,000 direct customers, 1,500 partners, 3,700 employees and 30 office locations in Britain, it finds technology solutions for what seems an infinite range of challenges, making complex concepts simple so businesses can focus on their own big ideas. The CEO Magazine spoke with Neil about what makes Daisy different.
“When I joined Daisy, it was born out of 46 acquisitions,” says Neil. “We have now since made a further three, so a total of 49 acquisitions.” Interestingly, it was Neil who orchestrated the largest acquisition, swallowing the Phoenix IT Group in 2015. “You know if you can buy an organisation that adds incremental value to shareholders that are accretive to shareholder value and also add organic growth at the same time, that is a winning ingredient,” he says.
A new technological infrastructure
Neil sees Daisy at the heart of the global digital revolution, helping businesses to embrace and harness relentless technological change by creating a new technological infrastructure that touches a diverse range of industries and drives efficiency and growth.
“There is a convergence of telecommunications and IT which is inevitable — which actually is already happening — and I don’t think there are any players out there that have both the capability and the flexibility to address the market in a way that we can,” says Neil, adding that he is not out to compete with giant system integrators that have the global enterprise market covered. “We instead work with those larger players, providing them with complementary and extended services. We are non-threatening to them; in fact, we are a very important player that they depend on, and vice versa.”
‘Daisy stands for something’
“We are very clear in terms of our market segmentation,” says Neil. He describes Daisy and its 3,700 employees as a company that is “big enough to cope, but small enough to care”. Daisy’s team prides itself on its breadth of offering, technical expertise and passion for customer service. Neil believes this combination of passion, inventive attitude and expertise leads to an unmatched understanding of varied markets and the challenges businesses face dealing within them.
“Daisy stands for something,” Neil says. “It stands for all of our colleagues being driven, accountable, innovative, successful and treating the organisation like it is their own. All of this is extremely important to empowering people to make decisions on behalf of this organisation, and ensuring that our customers are served in that very flexible and caring manner is a massive differentiator for ourselves.”
Company Name key facts
- Company name: Daisy Group
- CEO: Neil Muller
- Headquarters: Nelson, UK
- Number of employees: 3,700
- Industry: IT & Electronics