Background
Premier Technical Services Group (PTSG) is a multidisciplinary building compliance business offering a wide range of technical compliance services. The firm employs more than 3,000 people and serves over 30,000 customers across 200,000 assets.
The company was set up by Paul Teasdale in 2007, who rapidly grew the business from a standing start to a near billion-pound enterprise. After going public in 2016, PTSG was bought by Macquarie and Warburg Pincus in 2021. American turnaround CEO Nikhil Varty was enticed out of retirement to lead PTSG as CEO in July 2022, with Paul now acting as Executive Chairman.Challenge
PTSG’s PE owners are ambitious for growth. They’re looking to double revenue to £600m pa and triple EBITDA to 90m pa within 3 years.
The biggest challenge to this is the way the company is structured. PTSG is comprised of almost 30 individual businesses – often small, family-run firms that have historically operated with a great deal of autonomy. Recognising the need to change the business in order to prepare for growth, Nikhil brought in seasoned Chief Transformation Officer Dean Zia Dar.Approach
Dean’s remit was to consolidate the businesses, simplify and streamline processes and introduce a more data-driven approach, creating a solid foundation for scaled profitable growth.
Before introducing individual strategic projects, Dean wanted to better understand how the business worked. He quickly recognised that the key to unlocking transformation lay in the individual businesses, so he spent the first two months visiting each one, learning how they operate and building relationships. Many of these firms had functioned in a certain way for many years to varying degrees of success. As such, Dean recognised that a heavy-handed approach would be met with resistance and that a more sensitive, collegiate way of working would be far more effective. The individual firms were broadly grouped into three: those that were performing well, those performing not so well, but with huge potential and those clearly underperforming and requiring the most attention. For the third group there were numerous issues to address, such as a lack of engineers and efficient processes and, in some cases, the need for new leadership. Those in the middle group typically had good but manual processes in place, so some automation was required to create efficiencies. In some ways, the higher-performing businesses were the most challenging and resistant to change. What Dean discovered was that, although they were doing well in and around the regions where they were based, they shared a lot of the same customers. By pooling their engineers and cross-selling their services, the firms could quite quickly unlock a lot of untapped potential for organic growth. Dean has been instrumental in introducing cutting-edge technology to drive successful turnaround projects across various companies. By implementing application consolidation strategies, he has streamlined operations by creating a more efficient and cost-effective technological infrastructure. Furthermore, his expertise in data analytics and data integrity has allowed him to harness information from all of a company’s systems, generating valuable data-driven insights that have been crucial in informing strategic decisions and improving overall business performance. As an example of this, Dean introduced a workforce optimisation scheduling system and logistics management system. This included employing a company to load engineers’ vans overnight with materials so they didn’t have to drive to storage units. The new system also helped to better plan and manage engineers’ workloads. This drastically reduced the time engineers spent on the road and reduced the number of storage units required by a third. Many facilities management clients outsource their invoicing and job management to PTSG. As a result, around 300 people look after this part of the business, using almost 80 different online portals. Much of this work has now largely been automated, freeing up employees’ time to provide more effective customer service. Dean also identified a wide range of other quick wins and projects designed to improve the company. These included reducing material waste, improving the response time to customer enquiries, streamlining back office functions, centralising purchasing and rationalising IT platforms. Importantly, he ensured strong leaders were recruited to positions such as chief information officer (a completely new role), health and safety officer, chief legal officer and M&A director.Results
Dean was in the post for a year and successfully oversaw major transformation, resulting in 30% year-on-year growth in revenue and 15% growth to the bottom line due to savings. His work has directly generated £17m in terms of EBITDA value.
His work with the individual businesses led to a 15% increase in revenue without negatively impacting EBITDA and around a 15% improvement in revenue-generating potential thanks to optimised scheduling for engineers. The mobile engineer workforce itself has grown from 1,700 to 2,100 and the six consolidated business divisions are now pulling in one direction under a single sales team. With the introduction of automation, the freed-up employees are providing more effective customer service, reducing response times from 48 hours to just 8 hours. Most importantly, Dean has ensured the company is consolidated, streamlined and well positioned for exponential growth. By raising performance, PTSG has managed to secure funding to expand into Europe, with the acquisition of four companies on the horizon. This expansion allows the business to serve its European clients better whilst making the firm more attractive to any potential future buyers. How have the new systems and processes improved their customer service / customer feedback? The integration of systems now makes it much easier for any newly acquired company to seamlessly fit into the existing model and realise efficiency gains almost immediately. PTSG is now on track for 20% revenue growth and 20% EBITDA lift, on top of what has already been achieved.