Source: Comms Business August 2008
Turnover has more than quadrupled and in June 2008, not only did they win Comms Business ISP of the Year but more than a third of the remaining awards were won by Griffin white label partners. I thought it was time to open the bonnet of the Griffin machine and take a closer look at the company, its history, formula for success and predictions for the future.
Griffin saw the potential of the Internet early on and in 1995 the company began to design and build an ISP for the East Midlands. Griffin was one of the first companies in the UK to offer dial-up Internet access services.
The company has always been innovative, from the way it started selling Internet provision via affinity programmes, with Derby County Football club, to developing MOPS (Managed Online Provisioning System) for the channel. Griffin was also behind the Internet's first Premier League football commentary and the first broadcast of live music on the Internet.
Three years, and a string of awards later, the new management team has built on this centre of technical excellence and helped over 400 voice and data resellers become ISPs in their own right.
I asked John Dawson Griffin's Managing Director how he thought they had achieved this:
"Of course it wasn't just one thing. It certainly helped that Andrew [Dickinson] and I have both been in telecoms for over 20 years and have a good understanding of the SME market and the channel. Also Griffin had developed some great technology designed to make selling broadband very simple. All we had to do was tell people about it."
I asked Andrew about Griffin's go-to-market strategy.
"In our marketing and sales approach we like to talk about the issues facing the channel and the potential we can help them to realise rather than just dump features and jargon on them. We also learnt very early on that you must communicate clearly, honestly and immediately with your channel partners, especially when things go wrong. Our 400 partners have over 50,000 end users and most of them use our sophisticated online tools to do their own first line support. They accept that in IT, things sometimes break but they will not put up with some vague explanation several hours after their help desk has been flooded with calls."
What about the distinctive marketing style. Where did that come from?
Since joining the company at the end of 2005 Cherie [Everett] has had a very clear vision of how she wants to position Griffin Internet and that has come through clearly in her advertising, branding and PR strategies. She has a great team that can be rightfully proud of what they have achieved.
I asked Griffin's CTO Adrian Sunderland if he had any predictions for the future and how he thought these might affect the channel.
"We believe that when the last mile moves over to IP and is reliable enough and cheap enough, hosted applications like SaaS and IPCentrex will really take off in the SME market. Companies will look to suppliers they can trust and that can demonstrate technical excellence. This is why we have invested so heavily in building our own robust network and a first rate team of engineers and support staff. In the short to medium term demand is growing to link up homeworkers and satellite offices to the corporate LAN using private ADSL. Consequently we have spent the last year developing an MPLS IPVPN product that is easy and profitable for our partners to sell and we have already scored a number of significant successes with it."
And a final comment from the MD?
"Ultimately a company's competitive edge comes from its employees and we need to make sure that we continue to develop a culture and an environment that attracts the best people to Griffin. Similarly we need to remember that our customers pay our wages and we should never stop listening to them. The day we lose our humility and start believing our own PR we'll be in trouble!"