Member Article

YFM-backed Leeds software scale up Force24 sees record results

Force24, the Leeds-headquartered marketing automation platform which is supported by YFM Equity Partners (YFM), has put in another strong financial performance. Financial statements filed at Companies House show turnover growing to almost £3.5m for the year ending 31 December 2020.

Led by the founders, CEO Adam Oldfield and commercial director Nick Washbourne, Force24 is a SaaS-based marketing automation platform that allows marketers to deliver personalised marketing campaigns harnessing a multitude of native Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integrations. The company’s latest financial results are in line with its ambitious plans to rapidly scale up following the £4.8m investment backed by YFM in November 2020.

Since YFM’s investment, the award-winning business has seen a 120% increase in employees, rising to a 93-strong team, and has made several senior hires including appointing a new finance director, a customer success director and a chair. Its customer base has also grown by 33% with the addition of more than 100 new clients including a number of high-profile companies such as Checkatrade, Welcome to Yorkshire and Pentagon Motor Group. The business delivered over 900m marketing emails in the last year alone.

Adam Oldfield said: “It has been another year of strong growth for us as we continue to build on our position as one of the leaders in marketing automation in the UK. Having worked closely with our clients to navigate our way through the initial disruption after the first lockdown, we have proved able to support their digital transformation with the accelerated move online because of the pandemic. Force24 has a unique product and a great team as well as a supportive investment partner at our side who really understands the sector, shares our ethos and believes in our vision.”

Matt Cox, finance director added: “The financial results for 2020 were in line with our expectations, showing good revenue growth of 17% year on year. This was driven by strong new customer acquisition, up 40% compared to 2019, which was especially encouraging given the significant impact of the pandemic, and a result of our ongoing focus on driving improved customer satisfaction and retention.

“Since gaining the support of YFM, there has been significant investment in key areas of the business which has helped strengthen our teams, in particular in our customer success, sales and engineering functions, as well as the appointment of key leadership roles. This has enabled us to place even greater focus on product improvements and please customers with benefits such as free training and support for life which we are now able to deliver more consistently, providing an even more responsive and cohesive customer experience. We are very confident that this gives us a really strong foundation on which to build in order to achieve our ambitious growth plans.”

Mike Clarke, partner at YFM and member of the Force24 board, comments: “With our portfolio experience of supporting the scale up of SaaS businesses, we immediately recognised Force24’s potential and knew we had the skillset to help its rapid growth trajectory. Already, the business is well on its way to achieving market leading SaaS metrics in customer retention and revenue growth – we expect another strong year ahead.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Emma Kilmurray .