Flotek's Jay Ball on exceptional growth and a year of investment

Flotek has spent its latest financial year preparing for its next stage of growth. Revenue has grown by around 25%, and the group has put a significant share of that growth back into its people, its service and its platform.

That investment follows a period of rapid expansion. Since August 2022, when Flotek made its first acquisition, Gower Business Systems, a 12-person IT reseller, the group has completed 17 acquisitions and grown into a business of more than 100 people serving more than 2,000 customers.

“We had a clear choice this year: take the profit, or invest it in the business,” says Jay Ball, Flotek's chief executive and co-founder. “We had acquired a large number of businesses in a short time. The right decision was to build the structure that supports them, so the next phase of growth rests on solid foundations.”

For owners of managed service providers and comms resellers, and for the investors who follow the sector, Flotek offers a clear example of a buy-and-build that is growing fast organically while continuing to add scale through acquisition.

From one reseller to 17 acquisitions

Ball founded Flotek with managing director Malcolm Holland and chief financial officer David Middleton. Gower was the starting point. Four further acquisitions followed before the end of 2022, including MazingTree, Cloud9ine, Liberty Solution and Saecom, and five more in 2023, among them ECS Solutions, FlexiNet, ToolK-IT, ikona IT and Orbiss.

“The first 18 months were intense,” Ball says. “We had a clear view of what we wanted to build, and the right businesses were available, so we acted quickly. Many of the founders we spoke to valued that we were owner-managed and committed to keeping their teams.”

In 2024 the group added OES and Colbek. Simpology and Microshade Business Consultants followed in 2025, along with the remaining stake in Office Equipment Systems.

“We set the pace of acquisitions deliberately,” he says. “Each business needs to be properly integrated and its customers well served before we take on the next one.”

Today the group provides managed IT and cyber services, telephony and mobile, connectivity and print. Its principal technology partners include Microsoft, through Ingram Micro, Kaseya, Huntress, Gamma, Voicehost and Zen Internet. Alongside its core base of small and medium-sized businesses, the group is building a growing presence with public sector customers, including local councils.

Integration as the foundation

Every business Flotek has acquired is now fully integrated, with the exception of Clear Telecom, which joined in 2026. The group serves customers in sectors including legal, hospitality and estate agency.

“Acquiring a business is the first step,” Ball says. “The real value is created in the years that follow, when customers experience a consistent, high-quality service across the whole group. That is where we have focused.”

The investment went into leadership, service delivery, sales and additional office space. Flotek appointed an operations director from Openreach and established a dedicated business development team in mid-2025.

“We recruited people who have run larger operations than ours,” Ball says. “Appointing an operations director from Openreach reflects the scale we intend to reach.”

The group's pricing has remained firm throughout. “Our margins have held, so this growth has come from the value of our services, not from discounting,” he says. “Investing in people was a deliberate decision, made from a position of strength.”

Growth from long-term relationships

Flotek is growing fast organically and continuing to pursue further growth through acquisition, and recurring revenue makes up a growing share of the total. Ball says customer retention is the measure he follows most closely.

“Churn is the measure I watch most closely,” he says. “Customers who stay with us and take more services over time are the clearest sign that the model works.”

The offer is designed to be straightforward: a standard IT package and a premium package that adds cyber services, on a single monthly bill that covers every service a customer takes. Its typical customer has between 20 and 100 users.

“We keep the offer simple by design,” he says. “A 30-person estate agency wants clarity on cost and a single point of contact. That is what we give them.”

Much of the growth comes from extending existing relationships: adding telephony to IT accounts, and moving customers to premium IT and cyber services built on Huntress, Check Point and Citation.

“When we deliver a customer's IT well, telephony and connectivity usually follow,” Ball says. “Our existing relationships are a strong engine of organic growth, and every acquisition adds new customers to build on.”

The group is close to completing the migration of its remaining customer lines ahead of the PSTN switch-off.

Building its own products

Flotek has also invested in its own development team, building products that add value to its core offer. The team has developed dark web monitoring and the group's own telephony analytics platform, and AI has allowed it to build them faster.

“Having our own developers means we can add the products our customers ask for, rather than waiting for someone else to build them,” Ball says. “AI has made a real difference to how quickly we can take an idea and turn it into something customers can use.”

The group is now introducing a new AI agent on its service desk, and has launched a single-pane partner portal that brings its services and add-on products together. “Bringing every service into one place makes it easier for customers to add the next one when they need it,” he says.

The investment is delivering

Ball says the return on that investment is already showing in the group's most recent trading, with the people hired over the past year starting to contribute.

“The results are already visible,” he says. “Our recent performance reflects the people we brought in over the past year, and it puts us in a strong position going into the next phase.”

New customer wins have been strongest in IT, the area Ball is focused on growing. He says IT is usually where a relationship begins, with telephony and connectivity following once the customer is established with the service desk.

“IT is the anchor of the relationship,” he says. “Once a customer trusts our service desk, they want us to look after the rest of their technology too.”

The next phase of acquisitions

Acquisitions have continued alongside the investment. Flotek acquired the remaining stake in FlexiNet and bought Clear Telecom and Data earlier in 2026, and on 1 October announced the acquisition of Comvista Networks, a network infrastructure specialist in Glenrothes, Fife. The company describes it as its 17th acquisition. “Comvista is a business we already know and trust,” Ball said at the time.

Flotek has funded recent acquisitions from its own cash flow. Two further telecoms acquisitions are expected to complete shortly, after which the group plans to secure financing for its next phase.

Flotek continues to invest in each business after acquisition and uses it as a base for offering the group's wider services to its customers. Most of the businesses it has acquired have grown organically since joining.

The next phase places greater emphasis on IT. Flotek plans to acquire larger IT-focused businesses alongside further comms customer bases, and expects IT services to become the majority of the group.

“Our next acquisitions will be IT businesses, and they will be larger,” Ball says. “We will grow IT through both acquisition and the organic growth of the businesses we already own. Most of the businesses we have acquired have grown since joining the group, and that is the measure we expect to be judged on.”

He is clear about where the group stands. “This year was about strengthening the foundations,” he says. “We are now in a strong position for the next phase of growth.”