Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Qm Group

Queue solutions provider Qm Group in Milton Keynes has had some year. NEW ENTRY

Qm Group

Queue solutions provider Qm Group in Milton Keynes has had some year.

Strong sales growth propelled the company to a ranking of 93rd in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100, business has continued to flourish after a management buy- out during the spring, and Qm achieved a real coup recently in attracting Kelvin Mackenzie – former editor of The Sun and recently departed chairman and chief executive of The Wireless Group plc – as its non-executive chairman.

Introduced to the firm by Qm’s private equity backer, Advantage Capital, Mackenzie is a successful entrepreneur with more than a decade’s experience of running large corporate enterprises including BSkyB, the Mirror Group and, until recently, Talk Sport radio, which he helped to quadruple in value over a period of just seven years.

Qm knows a thing or two about growth in its own right. Since its formation in 1989, the company has become the UK market leader in providing effective queue management systems to some of the biggest names on the High Street including Argos, Boots, Royal Bank of Scotland, Wool-worths, Matalan, Tesco, Orange, and HBOS.

In 1993, QM Group developed and installed the ‘Cashier Number Three Please’ system in Post Offices across the UK.

Employing 70 people, Qm designs audio and video-based queue management systems.

It has more than 4,500 call-forward systems and 40,000 barriers in the market place and estimates that around 28 million people use its products each month.

Sales grew 41 per cent a year from an annualised £3.3m in 2002 to £6.6m in 2004.

Its MBO, backed by Advantage Capital, saw the company acquired from its founders by Alistair Agnew, former sales director and operations director Bernie Williams who became joint MDs. They were joined by David Finch as FD.

The founding directors Martin Christie and Terry Green remained on QM Group’s board contributing innovation and commercial expertise.