BIG INTERVIEW
CRISIS:
the mother of
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TECHNOLOGY
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REINVENTION
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Already challenged as an industry, coronavirus has tipped the scales for many in terms of addressing some latent as well as glaring issues in their organisations. But there’s much to be proud of, says EO Group’s Simon Drakeford, and the only way is up
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ne of the pioneers in the e-commerce game, EO Group has been entrepreneurial and inventive over the past 22 years, in the process creating and cementing a highly technology-driven business. CEO Simon Drakeford, well-known in the UK business supplies industry, currently also as Chairman of trade federation BOSS, is the first to admit that it hasn’t always been plain sailing, with plenty of adjustments and pivots needed. He’s immensely proud not only of what his company has achieved and, importantly, how it’s positioned itself for the future, particularly with the Office Power technology and services business, but also of how our industry has rallied in these most recent, difficult times. As he told OPI CEO Steve Hilleard in this interview, coronavirus may have given some operators the much needed impetus to align, restructure and reinvent.
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OPI: Could you give a brief synopsis of EO Group as it currently stands? Simon Drakeford: Sure. As you know, the first company in the group was Euroffice, our e-commerce business, which started in 1999. In 2013, we launched a new entity called Office Power – a combination of technology we have built in-house with services that we offer to support dealers in our industry. As the company grew and our offering diversified, around five years ago we introduced EO Group which serves as an umbrella brand for all our businesses. We now have three divisions in the group. One is our direct business, currently comprising our e-commerce operators Euroffice and UK Office Direct. They’re two different brands, but are both online, stockless resellers. Then we have Office Power which is our technology and services provider that supports traditional dealers in our sector.
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Finally, we have a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business with our bespoke proprietary technology platform at the centre of it. This platform is used by our direct businesses, Office Power dealers as well as individual independent licensees. OPI: You also had some interests in continental Europe at some stage I believe. SD: That’s correct. We went into Italy with Euroffice in 2009 and then into Germany in 2013. Italy worked well for a while, but we sold that business at the end of 2019 to enable us to focus on our UK and technology businesses. With regards to Germany, we didn’t stay in that market very long. We are still a small agile operator and we didn’t have the bandwidth to manage both Office Power and the German operation at the same time, so we needed to prioritise and focus our efforts. These were some of the key company milestones over the years. OPI: The Euroffice MBO that you headed 11 years ago was a big personal milestone for you I would expect? SD: Definitely. I hadn’t necessarily anticipated being in the industry for this long. I joined the company in 2007 and about three and a half years
