Recognising excellence

Jun 30 2009 by Karen Wilson, The Journal

THE development and achievements of all our investee companies, on whatever scale they succeed, is always very pleasing to the NEL team members who have worked with them on the way to reaching their commercial objectives.

But in amongst the many hundreds of companies that our investments have helped to expand and thrive, there are some that have shown themselves to be outstanding in their field, not just in the North East, but nationally and often overseas.

It is very difficult to single out specific companies for praise in this respect, as there are many more investees that are just as deserving of recognition as those mentioned here. However the diversity of the markets in which the following three firms operate clearly highlight the impact that investment capital can have across contrasting sectors.

JC Atkinson & Son

JC Atkinson & Son is the UK’s leading coffin manufacturer, and manufactures over 60,000 coffins per year, distributing them to clients across the UK and internationally.

Named by the Sunday Times as the Best Green Company for 2008, it manufactures a wide range of traditional coffins, caskets, urns and furniture, and operates a “best environmental practice” policy which is unrivalled in its industry.

It was the first, and remains the only UK firm to produce coffins and caskets entirely from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified timber, an accreditation guaranteeing the wood is derived from sustainable resources.

JC Atkinson & Son’s turnover, which now stands at £4.5m, has grown by around ten per cent per annum over recent years, and the company now employs around 75 people.

NEL has supported the business through various stages of growth with a number of investments over the last eight years, the most recent of which enabled the company to acquire a new state-of-the-art Combined Heat and Power (CHP) biomass generator.

As well as reducing its energy costs, with the generator meeting all the company’s power needs, the CHP biomass system will eventually create a new income stream for the company through the sale of its surplus electricity to other energy suppliers by returning it back onto the national grid.

The Onyx Group

In March 2006, Evolve Finance invested a significant six-figure sum in the multi-million pound Management Buy Out of the Onyx Group, one of the UK’s leading internet service providers, alongside a number of other investors.

We were approached by the senior management team who had identified a last-minute problem with their funding package and, within two weeks, we had provided sufficient capital to allow the deal to proceed to its original schedule.

In the three years since the MBO, the Onyx Group has gone from strength to strength, with the support of further investment from NEL.

It currently provides managed services and networking to over 3,000 UK customers from its three offices in North East England, along with its bases in Scotland and Slough, and has made a total of eight acquisitions, with plans to make more as the right opportunities arise.

Onyx Group also has three data centres and a workplace recovery centre in the region, as well as a second recovery centre in Edinburgh, and was the first company in the world to achieve the information security accreditation ISO 27001.

Perfiliate Technologies

Founded during the internet boom of the late 1990s, and trading under the buy.at brand, Perfiliate Technologies went on to manage affliate marketing for over 150 major high street names and member organisations, including Marks and Spencer, John Lewis, Barclaycard, HMV and The AA.

We made our first investment in buy.at in December 1999, with a further capital injection following in 2002, and worked closely with the management team as their business plan evolved to take into account the evolution of online commercial activity.

Speaking at the time of the second investment, Dave Brown, Chief Technology Officer at buy.at, said: “NEL’s continued involvement made a massive difference to our development, and it’s no exaggeration to say that without them, we wouldn’t be here now.

“We were one of the first ‘knowledge-based’ investments that they had made and would, therefore, have been something of an unknown quantity in some respects, but the financial and business expertise they made available, and the level-headed approach they took when everything began to change gave us a strong platform on which to base our commercial decisions.”

We completed a successful exit from our seven-year investment in the company in 2006 – and in February 2008, the company was sold to AOL for £7.2m.

At the heart of all our investments is the aim of regionally-based wealth creation, with employment an important by-product of this – JC Atkinson, Onyx, Perfiliate and many more of our investees have more than satisfied these criteria, and we fully expect to continue to see new names from our portfolio joining them in this respect for many years to come.