Why Jay Janes left a £275,000 executive role to build xpandly

A few years ago, Jay Janes made a decision that looked, on paper, slightly irrational. He walked away from a £275,000 executive role in the IT industry to start a company from scratch. That company is xpandly, a go-to-market partner built for the IT channel, and the reasoning behind it says as much about the channel as it does about its founder.

Janes was firmly on the executive track. Since 2018 he had held senior leadership positions across the channel, working with vendors, distributors and managed service providers on commercial growth, partner strategy and go-to-market execution. But the longer he spent operating at that level, the harder it became to ignore a pattern that appeared in almost every organization he worked with. For an industry so large and so sophisticated, the way many of its companies go to market simply does not work very well.

The same pattern across the channel

Working inside the channel gives a perspective that is difficult to get from the outside. In one role, Janes helped grow a technology distributor from £19m to £40m in revenue in three years. That growth was driven by more than marketing activity: it came from strengthening vendor relationships, improving partner engagement and redesigning the business’s go-to-market strategy from the ground up. The results attracted attention, and shortly afterwards he was headhunted for a chief revenue officer role at a £1bn competitor.

He held executive roles in the channel, working directly with vendors, distributors and MSPs, and was increasingly involved in mergers and acquisitions, particularly the commercial integrations where aligning two organizations’ go-to-market strategies becomes critical very quickly. Yet across those roles the same problem kept appearing 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 channel is designed to operate as a connected system. Vendors create the technology and set strategic direction. Distributors scale those opportunities through their partner networks. MSPs deliver the solutions to customers. When the three layers move together, growth accelerates quickly. When they operate independently, the system fragments: vendors run campaigns that partners never activate, distributors promote initiatives that MSPs do not prioritize, and MSPs run marketing that sits entirely outside vendor strategy. The result is a great deal of effort producing very little momentum.

The gap in the market

Around the same time, Janes began looking closely at the agencies serving the IT sector. Many describe themselves as technology or channel specialists, but most have simply chosen the industry as a niche. They understand the terminology, recognize the products and can run campaigns for technology companies. What they usually do not do is operate within the channel itself.

Very few agencies are led by people who have held senior roles inside vendors, distributors or MSPs, which means they rarely understand the commercial mechanics that drive growth. Go-to-market in the channel is not only positioning and creative work. It means operating within a layered commercial structure of vendor programs, partner networks, distribution models and funding frameworks. Without understanding how those elements interact, marketing tends to run independently of how the channel actually sells.

The decision to build xpandly

Eventually he reached a simple crossroads. He could keep solving these problems inside the organizations he worked for, one company at a time. Or he could step outside that structure and try to solve the problem for the wider channel. That decision led to xpandly.

The business was never intended to be another campaign execution agency. From the beginning the goal was a go-to-market partner for the channel, working across vendors, distributors and MSPs to align them around shared growth opportunities. Two principles shaped it from the start.

The first is that xpandly is fundamentally a data company. Early on it invested in building its own predictive analytics platform, designed for the dynamics of the channel. The platform tracks campaign performance and engagement signals in real time across target markets and ideal customer profiles, so the company can see where conversations are developing and where interest is building. Instead of waiting until the end of a campaign to analyze results, strategy can shift while activity is still running: messaging changes, targeting evolves and campaigns move toward the segments that are responding.

The second is that xpandly operates as a go-to-market partner rather than a traditional marketing agency. Designing a go-to-market strategy that works across vendors, distributors and MSPs requires a deeper understanding of how the system sells and how partners interact, and that is where most of the company’s work sits.

Three years and $100m later

xpandly says it now tracks more than 5,000 MSPs across the UK and the United States, alongside more than 200 technology vendors.

The company recently marked its third birthday. In that time it has grown into a partner agency serving technology organizations across six countries, with 70% of its business in the United States. Since launching, xpandly says it has generated more than $100m (£75m) in global sales pipeline for clients and more than $50m in closed revenue. Through its commercial consultancy work it also says it has moved more than $140m of MSP revenue around the distribution ecosystem, saving MSPs more than $3m a year in licensing and services costs. Those are the company’s own figures.

The results, in Janes’s telling, come from more than running campaigns. They come from aligning how vendors, distributors and MSPs approach go-to-market and combining that alignment with live data, so strategy evolves as the market responds. The channel remains a powerful commercial ecosystem, and his conviction is unchanged: when vendors, distributors and MSPs work together, growth accelerates quickly. Leaving a £275,000 role to prove it was, he would say, the rational choice after all.