28 01732 759725 COMMS Moving with the times Not at all, says Arnold-Roberts. He points out that in the last few years senior management have looked at around 25 potential acquisitions without finding one that would boost Voiceflex’s revenue and add value to its technology stack without slowing down organic growth or eroding CX, adding that with the scale the company now has, future acquisitions are very much on the table. Measured portfolio growth Voiceflex’s focus on organic growth thus far is reflected in the continued expansion of its total addressable market (TAM), which it has done by increasing its partner network, currently numbering 2,500 including ever more IT MSPs looking to add voice services to their offerings, and by expanding its product offering to give partners more revenue opportunities and to gain a greater share of partners’ spend. In doing this, Arnold-Roberts’ guiding principle is to maintain focus by staying within increasingly elastic ‘voice application tramlines’, which, for him, means anything delivered by voice, such as contact centre light, WhatsApp, PCI compliance and AI Agents and transcription, and by partnering with best of breed solutions and then integrating them into Voiceflex’s own platform, to add Voiceflex’s added value to the partner channel. “If you build your own platform you have to spend a lot of time and money maintaining it and keeping it updated, so we took the strategic decision to partner with the best of breed in different areas – for example Televox for our UCaaS (unified communications as a service) product Flow and Audiocodes for its suite of products giving access into Zoom, WebEx and Microsoft. Where we add value is through voice integration and a single GUI on our partner portal which makes it super-easy for partners to consume all those services through us. They can come to us and sign one contract for multiple services instead of having to manage five or six different supplier engagements. Once their numbers are in our network they get access to all applications so it means one port for the lifecycle of the number.” Arnold-Roberts adds that one of Voiceflex’s core strengths has been its Arnold-Roberts says that this was one of the things that attracted him to Voiceflex when he joined the business in 2021, since when it has doubled revenue from just over £5 million to £11 million, with an EBIT of over £2 million, and increased headcount from 30 to 60 full‑time employees – all while transitioning to a fully remote working policy. While the closure of its London and Coventry offices has clearly been advantageous to Voiceflex for financial reasons, the transition to home working also demonstrates the value of much of the technology it sells and has helped create a corporate culture based on trust that Arnold-Roberts describes as ‘a breath of fresh air’. He adds that the transition has also been good for customers. “My main concern was always the impact remote working might have on our internal and our external customer service. We sell similar services to our competition, but one area where we can really differentiate ourselves is by making it easy for partners to deal with us. That’s something I’ve pushed incredibly hard over the last four years and if our transition to remote working had caused any decline in our Trustpilot or CSAT scores we would have reversed the decision.” As it happens, Voiceflex’s Trustpilot score is now 4.8 and rising; its CSAT score is 70-plus; and its annual employee NPS has gone up three years running. “You can’t completely predict the future,” explains Arnold-Roberts, “but at the moment remote working is absolutely working for us and allowing us to scale in a manageable manner, which is key as our north star over the next three years is to take the business to a turnover of £20 million, while keeping the CX above 4.6, keeping the CSAT above 70 and making sure our churn rate stays below 1%, which it is at the moment.” This represents double-digit organic growth, which he says is very much in the top quartile of Voiceflex’s sector when you exclude growth through acquisition and consolidation. So does Voiceflex’s focus on scaling through organic growth mean that it is not interested in acquisitions? Voiceflex is that rare thing – a company founded in 1998 that celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2025. CEO James Arnold-Roberts, who joined the communication solutions carrier four years ago in 2021, explains the discrepancy between the two milestones by pointing out that Voiceflex started out as an IT consultancy and only evolved into a network and SIP connectivity business after its largest client asked for advice about ‘this new-fangled technology called SIP’. “Nathan (Ronchetti) and Paul (Taylor) built the original network and SIP service for the client, saw that it worked and then looked at where the market was going and what the possibilities were and thought ‘we should build a network that is channelfocused so that we can deliver these services too’.” In that respect, 2005 marks the launch of Voiceflex as it exists today. Hence this year’s 20th anniversary celebrations. “Nathan and Paul are still here, and there are not many businesses in our sector where you’ve got that real authenticity and longevity, which I think gives Voiceflex a lot of trust in the market. People know who we are and know the individuals within the business.” Voiceflex marks 20-year anniversary with stronger focus on technology services, albeit underpinned by voice James Arnold-Roberts
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