The latest news from Meantime IT

A Kendal IT company which provides bespoke software for local authorities, social networking sites and tour operators has announced a 33% increase in turnover in the last 12 months.

Meantime, based in Kendal, Cumbria, has also just created its eighth full-time technical staff role, in a year which has seen IT job vacancies down 57%* and more than 335,000 redundancies in the sector in the last 12 months.

Meantime was founded in 2004 by managing director Fenner Pearson and has seen an overall increase in turnover of almost 300% in the last five years. After starting with just one employee, the company has just created a graduate position in web-development, taking the number of full-time technical staff to eight plus one part-time administration role.

Fenner, whose clients have included Royal Bank of Scotland, Asda and BT, puts the company's success down to his commitment to delivering IT systems on time and to budget.

"I've worked in IT since 1991 and I became very frustrated with the low standards that people have come to expect from their systems and providers," he says. "It seems to be accepted that jobs will take longer than they're supposed to, budgets will be exceeded and the finished result will never quite deliver what it promised. There's absolutely no need for any of that, and when I formed Meantime I made a clear commitment to deliver software on time, on budget and to the exact specification of the client."
That commitment has ensured Meantime's success, and over the last five years the company has grown solely through word of mouth, with half of its turnover coming from repeat business from existing customers and the rest from personal recommendation.

"Our clients know that they can trust us to deliver what they want without bombarding them with jargon and leaving them to muddle through when their system doesn't do what it was supposed to," says Fenner. "And for that reason, they return to us as they grow, and recommend us to other businesses."

Meantime's success has been recognised by the NWDA (North West Development Agency), which selected the company to take part in its High Growth Programme, a scheme created to support new businesses that have the scope to grow to a turnover of £0.5m within three years or established SMEs that have the ambition and capability of achieving a minimum of 20% per annum growth.

* IT Job Board, 4 August 2009