The NAV People

During our investment period TNP doubled its headcount and EBITDA grew by over 400%. Thanks to the optimisation of the pricing strategy and increasing value to customers the average day-rate achieved by the business increased by 30%. In July 2021 the business was acquired by Node4, a provider of managed hosting and IT services, generating a 5.6x for FPE and TNP’s founders over the course of the three-year investment period.

TNP was founded in 2009 by three Microsoft ERP experts – Ian Humphries, Matt Dredge and Peter Lingham - and grew organically to become the largest independent player in the market. We were attracted to the business’s depth of consulting capability against the backdrop of a large (c. £2bn) but fragmented market that was growing quickly as a result of customers transitioning from on-premise to SaaS solutions. We invested in 2018 to facilitate Peter’s retirement, while backing Ian and Matt, who continued to lead the business.

We supported TNP over the course of our investment period by:

• Hiring Paul White, a former senior Microsoft executive, as Chair, and enhancing the management team with an experienced CFO hire.

• Introducing a proposition and pricing review by an experienced FPE value creation expert to move pricing in line with service delivery quality. This was implemented by training consultants to better position TNP’s value with existing and new clients.

• Leading the acquisition of a key competitor, K3 Business Central, thereby securing 50 additional customers and £1.5m of annual recurring revenue.

• Investing behind in-house IP and Power Apps capability to provide value-add solutions on top of customers’ ERP implementations.

With the active support of FPE since its investment in 2018, we have built on a strong position in our market segment to grow our number of employees by more than 100% and profitability by over 400%