Leading the IT crowd

Intercity has become one of the UK’s most successful independent tech firms, supplying businesses and organisations of all types and sizes with the support to enable them to maximise their capabilities. HENRY CARPENTER meets the man who has spearheaded its growth.

It started, as these things so often do, by chance.

Charlie Blakemore, a leader in the aerospace sector who had spent the previous 30 years working at BAE Systems, hosted a networking group of CEOs. One of the guests was Andrew Jackson, the owner and group CEO of Intercity, the firm which his father had founded in the mid-1980s to serve the burgeoning mobile phone industry.

“We got chatting, and he called me up a month or so after that to tell me he was diversifying Intercity,” says the genial Blakemore from the company HQ in Holloway Head.

“He wondered if I would be interested in taking on a non-executive directorship role as he was looking to bring broader experience and operational capabilities to the team.”

Blakemore is as modest as he is popular in Birmingham business circles – which is to say, very – so let’s allow the facts do the talking.

Having progressed through the ranks at BAE over three decades with the aerospace giant, he ended up in charge of a £1.2 billion subsidiary – its global land arm – with 10,000 staff members across several countries.

That requires experience, know-how, and operational talent. This is what Jackson saw in him . . . but what did Blakemore see in Intercity which led him to eventually leaving BAE, having accepted Jackson’s interim offer of a stint as a NED at the Birmingham IT firm?

“First of all I really enjoyed the culture,” says Blakemore in response. “I could also see huge potential in the business. The firm’s foundations were very strong and the market demand was there.

“Also, if I had remained at BAE, it would have involved a lot more travel at a time when I had just turned 50 and wanted to work closer to home. My daughters were rapidly growing up and I was keen to spend much more time with my family.

“Andrew Jackson knew this and asked me to join Intercity full time. hand-held mobile phone at the Motorola in Chicago.

“From that first meeting, I bonded with Andrew. We complement each other so well.  

“We are a great team and Andrew helped create a brilliant platform for me to build upon. It was a big decision for me to leave a 34-year career at BAE Systems to join Intercity and seven years on, I am enjoying every day in our business.  

“I feel very fortunate to have worked for two fantastic businesses and with such great people.”

So it was in 2018 that Blakemore joined Intercity as chief operating officer. Before we discover what his remit was, it’s worth finding out a little bit more about Intercity’s history, and what sort of operation Blakemore was joining.

The business was founded in 1985 as Intercity Mobile Communications, three years after Andrew Jackson’s father, Alan, met Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first Spotting the possibilities of this new form of tech, Alan Jackson launched Intercity Mobile Communications in 1985 as an independent service provider for the mobile industry with six colleagues.

The firm grew and grew, and by 1998 there were 250 members of staff – the expansion of which coincided with the internet explosion. Indeed in 2010 it rebranded as Intercity Technology from Intercity Telecom, reflecting the shift from a mobile-focused business to a unified communications provider.

It is now an award-winning managed services provider, recently named a WIRED Trailblazer – which the tech magazine ran in partnership with HSBC – in recognition for its expertise in managed IT, cloud, cyber security and communications. Intercity helps companies and organisations across the UK transform their business performance through technology, enabling them to ‘do more’. Companies rely on their IT systems; when they go down, the user is paralysed. That’s how important healthy systems which maximise capabilities and offer an impregnable defence against risk are these days . . . and that is what Intercity seeks to provide. 

That the firm’s curve is now on the up and up, currently serving more the 1,300 customers nationwide, owes more than a little to the direction Blakemore has taken it over the last few years.

“When I joined my brief was to build on acquisitions and develop the business,” he says. “I set about putting the foundations in place for better delivery, with focus firmly on the customers. “We brought in new systems and apprenticeship schemes, and set up the business with really good, solid foundations for scaling.

“IT was a new sector for me, although I had been involved in tech for years, but it was about building a fantastic team and culture, and bringing a more professional service to our customers, along with good governance.

 “We have seen the net promoter score – the customer service metric – rise from 12 to plus 93, and we have worked really hard to continue to drive the right culture.”

In 2020 Blakemore “took on the whole shebang” when he was made CEO. With the emergence of Covid it was, as he euphemistically puts it, “an interesting time”. It was however to prove an extremely valuable period in many ways. The new Intercity boss immersed himself in meticulously studying the market and researching the sector, so he had a clear idea of how he wanted to grow the business.

“I felt we needed to be on the front foot,” he continues. “We thought there would be pent-up demand for IT providers after lockdown, and so we put a business plan together and invested in new technology, skills in cyber, and skills in managed IT.

 “We knew lots of businesses wanted a trusted partner. We built a really good strategy which is still in place today, following the maxim to be the best tech partner to work for and with.”

There were three key areas identified by Blakemore and the team to provide the foundations for further growth: communications, managed IT services, and cloud and security. This, he believed, along with a stronger focus on the new culture he helped to install at Intercity, would see the business stand tall in the very difficult and congested IT sector. And he’s not afraid to admit that it has not all been plain sailing.

“We have certainly had some tough months, and during Covid we did all our market intelligence but still didn’t know what the new norm would be,” he admits.

“We had 12 to 18 months where our EBITDA was below expectations, and in the years 2014 to 2020 it’s fair to say that the business experienced a steady decline. We simply had to invest and turn that around.

“But we’ve worked hard, re-branded, and re-focused on looking after our customers. The consequence was an organic rise in growth, from £28 million to over £42 million.

“The business has grown and hit new records. The expectation is to see year on-year growth over the next three years, Intercity holds a 3-star Best Companies accreditation achieving record sales and continuing to build solid foundations.”

Emphasis, too, is placed on attracting, nurturing and retaining talent – all of which is made considerably easier if Intercity is a proven ‘good place to work for’. So it would have been a useful vindication of the way the company operates and its environment when it was awarded a gold-rated Investors in People award, and the prestigious Best Companies three-star rating.

And with tech ever evolving, so does the concentration on new developments in the sector. For instance, Blakemore points to the dizzying rise of AI and growing risks to cyber as areas where his experts have been focusing on.

Mention is made time and again on the importance of nurturing and retaining talent, and Blakemore is proud of what he calls “a fantastic and young team who are setting us up for an exciting future”.

When it comes to scaling the business, the focus has very much been on strong organic growth. This in turn provides the cash to accelerate growth with targeted acquisitions.

Back in 2015 Intercity bought Gage Networks, the cloud communication specialists, and another case in point occurred earlier this year when Intercity bought the Bedfordshire-based firm Centrality, one of the UK’s most accredited Microsoft service partners which boasts more than 25 years of experience with the digital giant.

Centrality CEO David Keeling joined Intercity’s board as managing director of a new division focused on leveraging Centrality’s expertise in Microsoft’s suite of products and solutions. Centrality’s 100-strong team has continued to work from the Bedfordshire office, taking the combined workforce to more than 325.

“We have just completed the first major phase of business integration following the acquisition of Centrality,” says Blakemore.   “Centrality offers first-class Microsoft capabilities, including its own internal security operations centre. These have been integrated into our existing divisions, with David Keeling now leading our rapidly growing cloud and security division.

“We are delighted with this acquisition. We have shared values and we are already seeing a surge in sales pipeline with the new Microsoft capabilities that we can now offer our existing and new customers.

“The new capability expanded Intercity’s Microsoft offering, complimenting existing partnerships with vendors such as Vodafone, Virgin Media O2, EE, Juniper, Fortinet and Check Point.

“Centrality filled a gap for us, and we are now seeing a £60 million turnover as a result of the acquisition. 

“I am a firm believer that it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, and we have got great people, very ambitious growth plans, and a detailed three-year business plan.”

Does he have any numbers in mind?

“By the year 2030 we are aiming to achieve a turnover of £100 million with a staff count of over 500,” he says. You wouldn’t bet against the firm reaching these levels. It currently partners with some 1,300 customers spread across organisations ranging from large public sector bodies – such as hospitals, city councils, British Transport Police and the Environment Agency – and large, high-profile brands, through to lesser-known SMEs.

This portfolio has enabled the firm to extend its capabilities, and it is working with some of the strongest brands in the industry, helped of course by the acquisition of Centrality with its Microsoft connection.

While Intercity is very much a nationwide firm whose headquarters happen to be in Birmingham, it has certainly become an increasingly prominent force in its home city over the last few years. It is surely no accident that this coincides with Blakemore’s stewardship, and as a proud West Midlander you get the sense that he revels in some of the projects and organisations in the region which have been served by Intercity.

“We won the contract for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, which was brilliant,” he says. “In 2023 we were taken on by Warwickshire County Cricket Club at Edgbaston to provide IT support, and we are doing some exciting work with colleges in the region.

“We have got some brilliant customers, and at the heart of it we are working really hard to look after them all as well as we possibly can.

“While we are enjoying a period of real success, and posting record results year on year, I say to all the team that we have to remain humble. There are bound to be some bumps in the road.

“But it has been a really exciting journey, and Birmingham is the right place for us to be. It is fair to say that the tech sector here is one of the fastest growing in Europe, there are some fantastic universities in the region who are carrying out some really important research.

“It’s important that we enjoy this journey. I know how hard everyone works, and sometimes we are very stretched. But we can’t afford to stand still.”

We are coming towards the end of our chat but there is one more aspect of Intercity which Blakemore is keen to touch on – the steps the firm makes to give back to the community.

He cites the fact that some 1,500 schoolchildren from the Birmingham area have benefited in some way from assistance given to them by the Intercity team, often through work experience, advice on writing CVs or being interviewed. That’s in addition to the support and involvement in local digital poverty programmes.

Then there are the charities which the firm has supported – the likes of St Basils, Acorns Children’s Hospice and Birmingham Children’s Hospital spring to mind – not just with financial assistance, but also through time given. Several members of the team, for instance, were only too happy to help out in the Acorns garden.

The firm has committed ESG objectives too, and this is backed up by a platinum EcoVadis accreditation.

My colleague Carl Jones has written far more about Blakemore the man in the following pages (and it’s a great read), but he is widely known throughout Birmingham’s corporate firmament as being enormously engaged, trusted and respected.

Engaged, trusted, respected . . . three adjectives which sum up the very business he spearheads.

*This article was the cover story for the October 2024 edition of Birmingham Business