Our experience of working with ECI was incredibly positive. I can honestly say that we never had one difficult word between us in the three and a half years that we were working together and I don’t think that that would have been our experience everywhere.
CPOMS is a web-based system for the recording of child protection, safeguarding and wider pastoral and welfare information across the school. It essentially replaces a very paper-based system that schools typically used to use and it helps them share information that’s needed in a much more timely manner.
CPOMS is an absolutely fantastic business. I mean as a primary buyout, there’s lots of low hanging fruit to go for. The KPI suite is the Holy Grail of KPI suites. We’re talking EBITDA margin is greater than 65%, we’re talking revenue growth greater than 30%. We don’t see that type of KPI suite every day.
They did a lot of work to help us establish what our customers actually wanted, what was the biggest priorities for us in terms of growth and being able to reach more customers, and they really helped us develop a really clear roadmap.
The commercial team in particular developed a very sophisticated AI model. The output was a prioritised list of every single school in the UK that CPOMS could go out and directly target, which they did very successfully. But we also learnt a lot about the market in the process of doing that.
Schools grew from 6,000 at the point of entry to 14,000 at exit and 15,000 today, which is absolutely incredible growth.
Internationalisation strategy was a very important part of our investment period and we took our time to get it right. ECI’s New York office were crucial really in helping us explore the US district market, reaching out to school districts over there, showcasing CPOMS to them, asking all the right questions about what a product would need to do to be able to enter the market.
When it then came to speaking to a potential buyer pool, we were aware of what the needs were and therefore could showcase to them how CPOMS could be applicable to a market they were already in.
Straight away Raptor came across as an interesting potential acquirer, primarily because there’s a really strong cultural fit between the businesses, both deeply focused on student safety. And at the point of exit, clearly the international strategy for CPOMS had played out really well. CPOMS was in what, 34 countries? It had won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise. It was a massive success story.
Working with ECI has been a joy. They’re a great, great team. John is incredibly approachable, a pleasure to work with. From our perspective, he was keen to know how the business was doing but always left us to run the business day-to-day.
We thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Thank you very much. I’ll absolutely miss them, I’ve already told them many times.
