Thriving in such challenging times

ALL ACROSS the country, lockdown restrictions are beginning to ease. Families are finally reuniting in parks and gardens. Schools have welcomed back students. People are able to leave their local areas for the first time. Shops will soon open to the public after being shut for months. Hope has returned – albeit cautious hope.

As I began to review our first quarter of trading for 2021, I cast my mind back to this time last year. How different things were then. The first lockdown had just been announced and we were looking down the barrel of a year full of unknowns.

I’m so proud – and grateful – that we did indeed survive that year. We even managed to grow, win awards, and create a host of new products for customers.

Now, looking back over the opening months of 2021, I’m glad to say that we are continuing to thrive. Here are some of the highlights.

Our new shareholder

In February this year we announced a new deal with Great Hill Partners (GHP), which valued BigChange at £100m. This was an incredible achievement for the company, coming in the midst of a global pandemic.

Our new Boston-based partner has the expertise to help us to scale in the US and beyond; the new £75m in firepower will allow us to pursue both organic growth and acquisitions in the US, which is an enormous market for our technology.

Going for growth

Can you believe it? We have signed £5.5m-worth of new contracts in the first quarter. Based on our performance so far this year, we are on track to increase revenues by as much as 40 per cent across 2021.

We have won a record 90 customers over the past three months, up from during the same period last year. I won’t list them all here but we are proud that BigChange is now partnered with household names like EDF, the European energy giant, and that our reputation now precedes us: most new business comes in through word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers.

Expanding the team

Despite the impact of the pandemic, the BigChange team has grown rapidly. In the past three months, we have hired 26 new people and we continue to recruit across many teams. We will double the size of the team over the next three to five years, taking us to 400 people.

We have also made a number of strategic appointments that will dramatically accelerate our growth over the coming years.

The BigChange University Last year, we launched the BigChange University to help our customers unlock all the potential our technology could bring to their business.

Over the last nine months, we have created more and more modules, doing all we can to help customers automate manual processes and find more efficiency. I’m so proud of our team here: they have now created 27 different topics. In the last three months, 1,300 people have attended these virtual sessions. Doing our bit for charity

We have never stopped our contributions to charity, and supported three worthy causes in the last three months alone through our Motivational Monday series, which welcomes a different inspirational speaker each month.

We are proud to be doing our bit to contribute to the recovery of the UK economy.