When I arrived at work on Wednesday I think we all knew something special was about to happen. The day before all the department heads were advised that we were once more expecting visitors, this included our 4 other sales branches as well.
Over the last 6 months we have become accustomed to visitors the Customer Street office. Sometimes they would be seen from afar, sometimes they would be introduced to you before passing on to another department and sometimes they would stay a little longer to observe what was happening.
The purpose of their visits were known only to a few of the senior management team who would be directly involved in assisting with the processes involved in the separation of the business from our parent company, Iomart, and the preparatory work involved in the purchase by BT Directories.
It doesn’t take too long for rumours to circulate, some slightly more accurate than others, but the sadness is that for lots of legal reasons the City aren’t keen on us to be able to spread the good news until the ink is on the paper (when we broke the news to our teams the ink was still wet enough to smudge).
My email inbox has been in meltdown as the RSS feeds have poured in over the last 48 hours. The headlines have proclaimed that BT have spent £20M in acquiring UFindUs Ltd, owners of the Customer Street brand. I guess I always knew there would be interest in the sale as and when it went through, but, I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be reported from around the globe.
At 12pm as our staff were being addressed by Stuart Forrest and David Benjamin (the CEO of BT Directories) the both the BT and Iomart press departments simultaneously broke the news which was then, within minutes, being sent around the world. A short time after this the stories, now reassembled into a format suitable for their intended audience, were being sent back around the world again to break the news to whoever would be interested enough to find it.
I had no idea that there would be interest on this scale in the fact BT Directories had bought an online business directory. But it has gone to prove that despite the current “credit crunch” BT are really looking hard at their medium to long term business view and are prepared to invest in getting their resources right for the future. Why did BT buy UFindUs? David Benjamin is quoted as saying on one of the press releases I read that not only was our client base a big attraction but also our technical knowledge was a major factor.
There is no getting away from the fact that that the vision of people like Stuart Forrest in knowing what the market wants before the market even knows what it wants has been crucial in all of this. Likewise the ability of a very talented development and technical team to take these visions from drawing board to desktop have and will continue to play one of the largest parts in the success of the business.
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Tags: Aquisition, blogs, BT, BT Directories, business transfer, CEO, David Benjamin, Iomart, RSS, Stock Market, The City
