A few years ago, I made a decision that, on paper at least, looked slightly irrational. I walked away from a £275,000 executive role in the IT industry to start a company from scratch.
At that point, I was firmly on the executive track within the IT channel. Since 2018, I have held senior leadership positions across the ecosystem, working with vendors, distributors, and managed service providers on commercial growth, partner strategy, and go-to-market execution.
From the outside, it probably looked like a sensible place to stay.
But the longer I spent operating at that level in the channel, the harder it became to ignore something that kept appearing in almost every organisation I worked with.
For an industry that is so large and so sophisticated, the way many companies go to market simply does not work very well.
Seeing the same pattern across the channel
Working inside the IT channel gives you a perspective that is difficult to get from the outside.
In one role, I helped grow a technology distributor from £19 million to £40 million in revenue in just three years. That growth was not driven solely by marketing activity. It came from strengthening vendor relationships, improving partner engagement, and fundamentally redesigning the business’s go-to-market strategy.
That period of growth attracted attention, and shortly afterwards, I was headhunted for a Chief Revenue Officer role at a £1 billion competitor.
At that stage, my career path was fairly clear. I held executive leadership roles in the channel, working directly with vendors, distributors, and MSPs on commercial growth and ecosystem development. I had also been increasingly involved in mergers and acquisitions, particularly in commercial integrations, where aligning the go-to-market strategies of two organisations becomes critical very quickly.
Yet across those roles, I kept seeing the same problem appear in different forms.
Companies were investing heavily in marketing and launching campaigns, expecting the pipeline to follow. Vendors were building programs designed to drive partner demand. Distributors were promoting initiatives across their partner base.
There was no shortage of activity. What was missing was coordination.
The IT channel is designed to operate as a connected ecosystem. Vendors create the technology and set strategic direction. Distributors scale those opportunities through their partner networks. MSPs deliver the solutions to customers.
When those three layers move together, growth can accelerate very quickly.
When they operate independently, the system begins to fragment. Vendors run campaigns that partners never activate. Distributors promote initiatives that MSPs do not prioritise. MSPs run marketing that sits completely outside vendor strategy.
The result is a huge amount of effort producing very little real momentum.
The gap in the market
Around the same time, I began looking closely at the agencies serving the IT sector.
Many of them describe themselves as technology or channel specialists, but in reality, most have simply chosen the industry as a niche. They understand the terminology, they recognise the products, and they can run marketing campaigns for technology companies.
What they usually do not do is operate within the channel itself.
Very few agencies around the world are led by people who have held senior roles within vendors, distributors or MSPs, which means they rarely understand the commercial mechanics that actually drive growth in the ecosystem.
Go-to-market in the IT channel is not just about positioning or creative campaigns. It’s about operating within a layered commercial structure comprising vendor programs, partner ecosystems, distribution models, and funding frameworks.
Without understanding how those elements interact, marketing tends to operate independently of how the channel actually sells.
That gap between marketing activity and channel reality was something I kept seeing again and again.
The decision to build xpandly
Eventually, I realised I had reached a fairly simple crossroads.
I could continue solving these problems inside the organisations I worked for, improving the go-to-market strategy within one company at a time.
Or I could step outside that structure and try to solve the problem for the wider channel.
That decision is what led to xpandly.
The business was never intended to be another campaign execution agency. From the beginning, the goal was to build a go-to-market partner for the IT channel, working across vendors, distributors and MSPs to help align the ecosystem around shared growth opportunities.
Two principles shaped the company from the start.
The first is that xpandly is fundamentally a data company.
Early on, we invested heavily in building our own predictive analytics platform designed specifically for the dynamics of the IT channel. The platform tracks campaign performance and engagement signals in real time across target markets and ideal customer profiles, allowing us to see where conversations are developing and where interest is beginning to build.
That visibility changes how strategy works.
Instead of waiting until the end of a campaign to analyse the results, we can see engagement patterns as they emerge and adjust strategy while activity is still happening. Messaging can shift, targeting can evolve, and campaigns can move toward the segments of the market that are actively responding.
In practical terms, it allows the strategy to move at the same pace as the market itself.
The second principle is that xpandly operates as a go-to-market partner rather than a traditional marketing agency.
Running campaigns is relatively straightforward. Designing a go-to-market strategy that works across vendors, distributors, and MSPs requires a much deeper understanding of how the ecosystem sells and how partners interact.
That is where most of our work sits.
A sixty-thousand-foot view of the channel
Over time xpandly has developed visibility across a significant portion of the IT channel.
Today, we actively track more than 5,000 MSPs across the UK and the United States, alongside more than 200 technology vendors, which provides a fairly unique vantage point on how the ecosystem is evolving.
When you have that level of visibility, you start to see patterns very quickly.
You can see what fast-growth companies are doing differently. You can see which strategies consistently generate pipeline and which ones struggle to gain traction
Three years and $100M later
xpandly recently celebrated its third birthday.
In that time, the company has grown into a partner agency serving technology organisations across six countries, with 70% of its business in the United States. The business also recently joined the Reverberate Group, expanding our ability to support the IT channel internationally through media, publishing and PR.
Since launching, xpandly has generated more than $100 million in global sales pipeline for clients and more than $50 million in closed revenue.
And as part of its commercial consultancy service, it’s also moved more than $140M of MSP revenue around the Distributon ecosystem, saving MSPs more than $3M annually in licensing and services costs.
We have also become the leading agency globally for Microsoft Copilot lead generation, generating more than 2,000 qualified leads in one of the fastest-growing segments of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Those results are not simply the outcome of running campaigns.
They come from aligning how vendors, distributors, and MSPs approach go-to-market and combining that alignment with real data, allowing strategy to evolve as the market responds.
The IT channel remains one of the most powerful commercial ecosystems in the technology industry, and I remain of the belief that when vendors, distributors and MSPs work together, growth accelerates quickly.
