Mills launches £60m venture in Studley
By Stephanie Bartup, Midlands Correspondent
The entrepreneur who bought Studley-based UKSolutions has unveiled his new business venture which will be based in the Warwickshire suburb. Alastair Mills will launch Six Degrees, a managed data services provider, this morning. He told Insider the company planned to make an underlying profit of £15m by the end of 2012.
After selling his SpiriTel business to communications giant Daisy for £37m, Mills purchased several UK companies to create the Six Degrees Group. He bought UKSolutions in July this year for an undisclosed sum.
In its launch phase, Six Degrees has four offices; two in London and one each in Glasgow and Studley. The Midlands base will host the company's datacentre.
Mills said: "Our private cloud is built for business and we see the benefits as being transformational – that's why we’ve seen nearly 800 per cent growth in 12 months in our cloud solutions, and why we've made a big investment in more datacentre space to help us grow.
"The Midlands base is integral to the entire operation. We can definitely see the Midlands as a base from which to expand across the region and, hopefully, beyond."
Having acquired four separate businesses to start up the group, Mills said Six Degrees' fifth acquisition had almost been completed and would be announced "in the next month".
The entrepreneur secured backing from private equity firm Penta Capital to start up the new venture.
His aim is for Six Degrees to become "the most admired mid-market provider of managed data services". Described as a one-stop-shop for linking people, places and data, the company name was taken from the "six degrees of separation legend".
Mills expects the company to achieve organic growth of 20 per cent every year, and is aiming for underlying profit to hit £15m by the end of 2012.
The company currently employs about 100 people, with an initial 30 employees recruited to head up the Studley operation.
However, Mills estimated that this number could double over the next couple of years, with headcounts aiming to be grow by a fifth each year.
