Entrepreneur in focus: Cotton hungry for more at NCC

IT security firm NCC Group looks set join the elite FTSE top 250 companies in January.

Chief executive Rob Cotton said the Manchester company’s recent fund raising and placing and open offer had seen its market capitalisation reach £840m.

“We’re passing the billion dollar unicorn mark, which apparently everyone strives for,” he said.

“It means that from January we will be in the top 250 in January, after missing out narrowly last time.”

And he told TheBusinessDesk his ambition was to keep going and expanding the company which made its 22nd acquisition with the £93.5m takeover of Dutch threat intelligence specialist Fox-IT recently.

“NCC Group is a cornerstone of the Manchester landscape and is probably one of the world’s leading independent security providers,” he said.

“Globally we have 32 offices and employ 1,800 people operative in all corners of the world, with the exception of the Asia Pacific region.

Cotton, who lives in Cheshire, said although company is peerless in the fields it operates in, the Fox-IT acquisition provided NCC with one area of expertise it had not quite become world class in.

“Threat intelligence is about going into the dark markets and looking at what the bad guys are really doing and selling, all the pieces of malware out there and the guns for hire,” he said.

“We need people acting like real hackers, but legally, for your organisation to actually see what they are doing. That’s what threat intelligence brings.

Advanced cyptology and encryption techniques – are hugely important, said the 50-year-old Reading-born life-long Manchester United fan who initially trained as an accountant at Liverpool John Moores University.

“If we all acknowledge that the internet is fatally flawed that it is getting worse progressively (more vulnerable) and that applications are typically unsafe and infrastructure is virtually impossible to save, you need to do something to protect your data.

“You need to encrypt it. It increases the chances of it being retained and kept secure. It’s not something we should all jump up and down and worry about.

“We have to govern that process very carefully. You should be allowed to encrypt data.

“The threat intelligence market in itself will probably be worth about £1.5bn in the next couple of years with 60 to 70% or organisations taking it on board.”

Meanwhile, 2016 promises more for NCC with a relocation from its current 38,000sq ft facility on Oxford Road to 60,000 ft in the coming XYZ building in Spinningfields.

“We’re moving there because we have 350 people here and we’ve run out of space,” said Cotton, who in has spare time enjoys cycling and other outdoor pursuits.

He added: “We want to be the leader in that field, not just for the UK, but we want to take it over to our American business.

“In America we’ve got many offices and a good few hundred people and a great roster of the best clients in the world – all the great and the good in Silicon Valley and all the banks in Manhattan, so it has a real relevance to that market and what we’re good at doing is taking things out into those territories.”

More acquisitions are in the pipeline, but Cotton is refusing to be complacent.

“People make a huge mistake on acquisitions,” he said. “They think ‘I’ve done an acquisition, aren’t I a super hero?’.
 
“I say ‘ no you’ve signed a complex legal agreement and written out a large cheque’.”

“Instead of the term acquisitions, we’ve done 22 integrations.  The clever integration is the one that can make it become part of the bigger group.

“That’s not the arrogant ‘we’re big you’re small, you do what we say’ mentality. It’s that progressive slow, gradual learning process of what they do and that slow progressive move for those businesses to be integrated.

“You integrate businesses at the rate that the slowest person can cope with that change. In other words, you’re taking everyone with you.

“We had an acquisition in North America about six years ago – a company called I-SEC. And I think it’s probably fair to say that only in the last 12 months I’d call it properly integrated. Why? Because, if you’ve got really good people and really good culture, why do you want to change it?

“Where’s the ego in having to change its name or shred the letterhead. There’s no benefit to it whatsoever. It causes client confusion, staff unrest, the tiniest little things will affect people.
 
“The best thing is, that if you’re smart you learn from them as well. You nick their good ideas.

“You have to think why have they been successful? – so successful that you wanted to buy them. Probably because they do things really well.
 
“Even from the smallest businesses, we’ve taken little ideas and spread it back through the rest of our organisation.

“One of the things we took over was an 18 man business and that was spread across the whole organisation. It’s that bit of listening as well as preaching that’s important. It has to be that way round – listen first. And then make changes when it’s right.”

The future certainly is bright for NCC which recently raised £126m on the stock market with an open offer and placing, which has left the company with £80m of headroom to play with.