In 1986 Philip Miller’s father had an idea about the business he had set up with
Russ Colden. Anyone who opened the yellow pages would see his business first. Thus was ABCA born. Specialising in time and attendance and other low voltage systems, it was destined to make a big bang. This is the story of how it happened.
ABCA started off as a lifestyle business in the Northeast of England then in his mid-50s, the senior Mr Miller decided to get his son, Philip involved in the family business Philip Miller was then based in the US. He had recently graduated in economics from Ohio Wesleyan University on a football scholarship and was working as a graduate sales manager for Ferguson Enterprises.
It was 2005 when Philip Miller returned to the UK and joined forces with his father. The pair worked well together, sharing similar styles and motivations.
Miller observes, “Luckily me and my dad got on, you know, two very similar people,
very sales orientated with mutual respect. That was always our drive.”
The time and place were auspicious for the business’s growth; ABCA was about to take off.
“I always say business is about the right people in the right place at the right time, which is something I got from my first boss, Chris Bodenstine at Ferguson Enterprises,” Miller smiles.
It was a philosophy he quickly put into practice, bringing two men on board who would be critical to ABCA’s progress. Chris Scott was an old school friend of Miller’s whom he enticed from an accountancy position in London, and Phil Batson, another accountant, joined as ABCA’s financial controller. Scott and Batson are still with ABCA and the three set about growing the business together.
As it grew it also began to take shape, adding fire and security to its services and developing a national presence with offices in the North West, Midlands and London. It is now structured on a three-pillar basis with each pillar split into the two.
The first pillar is active fire and security, the second pillar is passive fire and the third pillar is electrical compliance. Inside each pillar, is a service department and an installation department.
ABCA’s structure is emphatically not a random one, rather it is formed in an interlocking logical structure as Miller explains: “For example, you’ve got a fire alarm system, then sitting in the service department is maintenance. So, you go out and you do your preventative fire alarm, emergency light, access control, maintenance. And you tell the customer whether it’s all working or not. If you need to upgrade it, that’s where the install sits. And that’s replicated across passive fire and now the electrical side as well. Customers realise the quality of our service and want us to do more than just one pillar for them.”
As the business grew it changed at the top: the Millers bought out Russ Colden and Chris Scott and Phil Batson became shareholders, then with Philip Miller they bought his father out.
Then in 2020 there was another significant milestone in ABCA’s story when it made its first acquisition, a Northeast based residential and B2B business called Tyneside. While Tyneside would continue providing services to businesses and residents, ABCA was evolving into a national company, specialising in the social housing market. Around 90 percent of its work currently is with social housing providers, such as Notting Hill Housing, Guinness Housing, Clarion Housing, Metropolitan Housing and Home Group.
The first part of ABCA’s story had concluded. Another chapter was about to begin.
When Miller met private equity investor Ali Khanbhai from Trimountain Partners he remembers that the pair just clicked. Their commercially fruitful relationship would illustrate yet again the pinpoint accuracy of Miller’s observation that business success is down to the right people and the right time.
Trimountain Partners invested in ABCA in 2021, enabling its expansion. It now has a turnover of £40 million and in the last quarter has acquired a further quartet of businesses. One of them, HBS, is a vertical integration into steel door manufacturing, while another is an electrical business, Citrus Group. Two of the businesses, AGS Tech and Maintec are very similar to ABCA and in the Active Fire & Security pillar, while HBS is a steel door manufacturing business.
ABCA’s acquisition of Citrus Group was not a mere impulse buy, however. There was a very definite rationale to it.
Miller notes: “The reason we want the electrical arm is because strategically it is the right thing to cross-sell to all our existing customers.”
Indeed, a lot of thought has gone into ensuring that ABCA’s growth trajectory has not been at the expense of existing relationships. It has ensured that its commitment to customer relationships remains strong amidst rapid growth and expansion by concentrating on one sector as opposed to going across various sectors.
As Miller likes to put it, ABCA hasn’t diversified across sectors, rather it has diversified
its offering within sectors.
His astute stewardship of ABCA has been facilitated by his extensive knowledge of the business’s nuts and bolts, itself a product of the careful path his father steered for him.
“I went in straight as an engineer rather than anything business and sales wise,” he says.
It meant that he learned how the company worked beginning from the bottom upwards, from which everything else would follow.
“I was pulling cables on the outside of large high-rise blocks of flats for him when I first came back,” he says, adding: “In ABCA I’ve done every role there is engineering, sales, procurement, project management, finance, HR, IT, everything. “
The intimacy of his company knowledge would hold him in good stead for assuming ABCA’s reins. Miller started adopting the role of MD in 2007-8, officially taking the helm in 2009. The older Miller retired in 2011 but still kept his eye on the business.
As ABCA grew, acquired businesses and evolved, Phil Batson moved into its MD role while Miller stepped into the position of chief executive, looking at the more strategic side of the business, assessing its strengths and what sets it apart from the competition.
A clear point of differentiation is ABCA’s concentration on writing quality tender documents, produced by its own dedicated in-house bid writing team.
“We are staying in front of that, tender writing has been vitally important for us; that’s one way that we’ve differentiated ourselves,” Miller says.
Another distinctive feature of ABCA is that it maintains a personable and family-oriented feel. The directors and owners of the business have always been very much hands-on, very involved in the day-to-day.
Miller likes to get to know the new recruits, to tell them where he’s from and what he’s like. He wants a feeling of openness to pervade the operation, where people can feel free to ask questions. He doesn’t want the atmosphere to be one that is stiff and corporate.
The roll up your sleeves and get stuck in ethos has always been central to ABCA. Miller vividly remembers his father working weekends, pulling in alarm cables when he first started.
“He was not afraid of doing anything in the business, whatever it needed, it would be done,” Miller says, adding: “It was very much hands-on, work hard, play hard kind of environment with that work ethic from my dad and Russ.”
As the future unfolds Miller sees ABCA evolving into other sectors beyond the fire and security industry but doing so crucially without losing its culture and identity.
Yet Miller strongly believes in empowerment and letting people further down the chain of command take responsibility. Key to empowering his workforce is the human resources department.
He says: “As you grow, you’ve got to have a quality HR setup. To make people feel like they’re involved, like they’ve got a say, and to really feel empowered to do that.”
A good HR department will spot and encourage the talent on which ABCA thrives. It is a source of pride for Miller that the people that are working in the business at the senior level are people that have started at the bottom, coming in as administrators or engineers and working their way up the business.
Those who have risen to the top in ABCA are the ones who speak up and think outside the box, Miller notes. It’s what people are encouraged to do throughout their career at the business.
The first volume in the ABCA has been completed. It has proven it can grow organically. Now Miller wants to show it can expand through strategic acquisitions. There’s every reason to suppose that it can. The road ahead is well lit and ABCA’s future is bright with promise.