My Big Idea: Forrit content management system

Hi Peter! What's the elevator pitch for Forrit?

Forrit One is a secure, scalable, and intuitive Content Management System with an integrated Service Delivery Hub that provides and manages all required cloud services. This allows users to create, organise and publish content at speed for all digital channels, including websites and mobile apps.

Why does the market need it? 

There are common challenges that large organisations face in managing complex digital estates. We help users overcome these, enabling them to deliver any content to any device, in any language, while ensuring the most stringent security, accessibility, and compliance standards are met.

Where is the business today? 

We've built a great company and culture. Our mature, robust product is trusted and used by leading brands and businesses like Lloyds of London and Tesco Bank. Now our goal is to accelerate growth by ramping up our Direct to Customer Sales and Marketing activities, as well as expanding our partner network to drive co-sell and support with deployment and managed services.

What made you think there was money in this? 

We saw a huge chasm between the goals of IT teams - such as security and scalability, and those of the marketing teams, which needed agility and ease of use - none of the current CMS providers addressed this gap. Cannibalisation of existing business models is also one of the hardest things for a large organisation to do. There were many IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions in the market, but none were truly Platform as a Service - PaaS. We wanted to give control of the marketing platforms to the organisation's internal IT and marketing teams by building a PaaS solution that catered to both, allowing secure, compliant, and seamless content management.

The marketplace for this type of solution runs into the tens of billions of dollars, and we were confident that if we made something for large enterprises that delivered more with less we could do well. We put the customer at the centre of everything we built and made a solution to benefit them. We built, shared, collected feedback, and honed the product.

While at Microsoft, I also learned that every deal had three currencies: PR, feedback, and cash. We’ve tried to get as much feedback from every deal and re-engineered this into the solution.

What's your biggest strength? 

Our product. A tight bootstrapped budget is also key and critically we had the inputs and feedback from large enterprise clients that we could use to build a product that meets their real-world needs. We displaced the CMS market leaders from the world’s largest insurance market, and our clients love the flexibility, performance, and product ease of use. Now with a competitive product, we can move to growth mode and generate positive cash flow. Reaching that point quickly will allow us to retain control of our company and avoid the short-term decision-making often seen in businesses controlled by investors.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Passion, our customer-centric approach, and learning from the forefathers of the tech industry. Steve Jobs said you can get a lot wrong if you get the product right, and Bill Gates spoke a lot about tenacity and working hard. Both of these philosophies are incorporated into our company.

We have built the solution on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment Microsoft made in Azure and leverage 17 services as part of our solution. Our product is so well integrated that you can’t see where Microsoft’s products finish and ours start.

How do you market the company?

To date, we’ve spent all our money on the product with limited spend on marketing. We target large enterprises and public sector bodies and referrals from existing customers and Partners have worked well for us. That said, we have found events that enable us to spend quality time with key MarTech decision-makers are delivering strong ROI, so we will continue to invest in this area. Recently we appointed a new PR agency, GingerMay who will help raise our brand profile and credibility with key decision-makers in what is an incredibly competitive and dynamic category.

What funding do you have? Is it enough? 

We have client revenues and have taken minimal investment. Every penny we make goes to the company. There have been no dividends, and no cash has removed from the table through investment and tight cash management.

It is important to manage your cash flow as wisely as you can. Raising cash is a balance; having too little is a nightmare, but so is having too much. Taking too much investment puts pressure on the business because investors want to see it spent to drive growth.

We are in a pivotal phase of our business. For several years we have been all about the product with investment and laser focus on building it. Now we are moving to be all about the growth of our client base while at the same time enhancing our solution.

The old story is true: revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash flow is reality.

Tell us about the business model

One of the fundamentals I learned at Microsoft was that it is important to make a product easy to sell - have a clear value proposition, easy to buy - have a simple licensing/pricing model, and easy to use - have a clean user experience and great documentation.

The most important things in a subscription PaaS/SaaS solution are making it easy to explain, easy to count, and defendable through transparency.

Forrit has built a PaaS CMS based on Azure. We have two fundamental models for charging - the first is a straight monthly subscription model contracted directly with us through a scope of work and a monthly contract. The second is via the Microsoft marketplace bought through their MACC agreements.

Now that the business has the product right, great client use cases, and is confident that our solution is super secure, scalable, and easy to use, we are heading into full growth mode. This will be achieved through partnering effectively with Microsoft, like-minded SIs (Systems Integrators), and complementary ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to deliver full-stack composable solutions for enterprise clients.

What were you doing before? 

I was at Microsoft for 17 years, with a couple of years as a Partner at Accenture in the middle of this tenure.

The initial idea for building the Azure-based CMS came from a meeting I hosted with Bill Gates and executives from Unilever at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Centre in 2006.

I spent years listening to the world’s largest enterprises' struggles to deliver global websites, which inspired the inception of Forrit.

With the advent of Microsoft’s Azure cloud, it became apparent that there was a gap in the market to build a CMS that was tightly coupled to leverage this investment by Microsoft.

Azure has many tools that Forrit leverages to make this a seamless experience, from AI tools monitoring denial of service attacks, load balancing, video delivery, auto-scaling, super-fast deployments, unlimited scaling, chatbots, video delivery, etc.

What is the future vision? 

Simple – build a global company that delivers value to enterprise organisations by producing world-class products. On the back of this, build a globally recognised brand. We want to be a great company to work for with a great culture; recognised as a thought leader in producing talented employees by expanding our investments in graduate apprenticeships and staff training and as a firm of trusted advisors and industry experts.

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