Halo: The Stowmarket software company sponsoring Ipswich Town
Paul Hamilton, 44, is Halo's co-founder and chief executive officer.His life started in the north-east of Scotland where his mum was a nurse and his dad a bus driver as well as a driving instructor."It was very much a working class upbringing," he says."I just thought running businesses was something other people did."I didn't go to fancy schools. I did go to university, but not because I loved learning, just because I felt like I wanted to earn money so I could make some choices in my life like even where to go to holiday."I certainly didn't think I'd ever be running a business."
From 2004 to 2008, Mr Hamilton worked with his co-founder Alan Rogerson to offer bespoke software packages to companies.He says there was a "turning point" when he realised they could create their own sellable product and so he set up Net Help Desk.To be closer to his wife's family, he moved to Suffolk where the company soon began to take shape. "My mother-in-law had a two bedroom flat and I paid her £50 a month to rent her spare bedroom and that was my office from 2009 to 2011," he says.
Soon afterwards, the firm moved into a 200-sq-ft space in Stowmarket. In 2011, he took on his first employee, but conscious of wanting to grow his business in a sustainable way, he only hired a couple more people over the next four years.The company then moved into a larger office in the town in 2017 and then three years later Covid-19 hit.With a young workforce - mostly university graduates - the staff collectively felt they were unable to work effectively from home and a few months later they went back into the office as lockdown restrictions eased that summer.In 2020, the company also rebranded as Halo and in 2021 moved into their current office - a modern-looking space with its own bar, bean bags, and pool and ping pong tables. The slide found in the entrance is something Mr Hamilton admits he had used "loads of times" himself.
Halo's culture is massive for it success, according to Mr Hamilton.Its current team of 150 are entrusted to get on with their work and manage their own time. Budgeting and cash flow forecasting is something he says the company also does not do - instead it runs day-to-day on "instinct", something Mr Hamilton admits could sound "crazy"."We've now doubled revenue every year for eight years in a row, and if you look at any metric we're smashing it in every regard, but we don't care what happens from quarter to quarter," he explains."Our enterprise team aren't on commission; there is a team commission, but there's no individual commission."And you can tell, as a customer engaging with us they're almost like, 'Woah, where's the aggression? This is so different to what we're used to'."It's because we don't have quarterly targets, we don't have annual targets, we just have almost like an ideology of where we want the business to be."
Halo is not in a hurry to rush things and Mr Hamilton says it is doing things "very differently" to its competitors, many of which can be found in Silicon Valley in California, United States. But Suffolk is key for Halo and while it was "purely by chance" Mr Hamilton decided to set up the headquarters here, he says the county has been "brilliant" and offers good transport links as well as a "good quality of life" with low crime.It also offers his young workforce a place to live where the cost of living is considerably lower than the likes of London or Silicon Valley.
Halo has been getting itself familiar with the sporting world, with partnerships with McLaren's F1 team and snooker's World Championship.Closer to home, in 2023 Halo became Ipswich Town's new sleeve sponsor, a relationship which has blossomed.Mr Hamilton says his passion for the club grew the more he attended games and now it was rare if he missed one."I literally plan my calendar, which might be quite bad for a leader of a business, but I do plan it around fixtures," he reveals."There is something very tribal about football... it's the feeling of belonging, it's the passion, it's the noise."There's so much alignment of what's going on at that football club and what's going on at Halo."We feel like we're in a tournament, we're in the Champions League now... competing with the big boys and we're winning."
Mr Hamilton has big ambitions for the future - Halo will never be sold or merged and he is keen to continue with its successful graduate programme while embedding itself further within Suffolk.He wants to launch a Halo business school in partnership with the University of Suffolk and he reveals the company is looking to grow to 1,000 people within the next five years, which will probably require an office move to Ipswich.Mr Hamilton hopes to be able to set up a foundation that will allow customers to decide which charitable causes it puts a share of its revenue into. "I'm almost, from my point of view, a temporary custodian of the business and in 40 years' time I'll pass on," he said."But it will just go down through generations and it's important we have people in the same mindset - Halo in terms of philosophy, a business idea and a brand."It's going to transcend far beyond software."
'Civic business'
John Dugmore, chief executive, Suffolk Chamber of Commerce said: "Halo is a particularly high-profiled and inspiring example of a business type that is increasingly a core feature of the Suffolk commercial landscape: the principled, fast-growing and innovative scale-up with national and international reach."It is especially encouraging that even as the firm accelerates its ambitions, Halo will remain headquartered in Suffolk reinforcing our county's reputation as a tech hot spot. "Furthermore, the company's commitment to Suffolk not least through its sponsorship arrangements and its active membership of Suffolk Chamber, draws on an older local business tradition: that of the civic business."
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