It feels incredibly special to be celebrating our 15th year in business this year! In that time, we've been lucky to work on behalf of some great clients and employ some amazing people. Thank you to all our staff, clients and suppliers (past and present) for contributing to the last 15 years of PSP!

We celebrated the occasion with a delicious BBQ and a staff raffle with prizes of up to £500 in Amazon vouchers. Check out some of the photos from the day.

 

This is the story of how two people (an IT Director and an Operations Director) transformed their business idea into one of the UK’s largest independent software development agencies.

 

How PSP Was Formed

Our journey began from a shared frustration with the prevailing practices in the IT industry. Co-founders Joe and Brett, drawing on their extensive experience in the automotive and aerospace sectors, frequently encountered IT providers who offered deceptively low initial quotes. These engagements often resulted in solutions that failed to meet their intended purpose, leading to unexpected additional charges for remediation—work deemed "outside the original brief."

Driven by this first-hand experience, Joe and Brett established PSP, armed with a clear vision: to deliver genuine value through cost-effective IT solutions. Their core ambition was to rectify these industry shortcomings by providing software solutions meticulously tailored to each client's unique requirements and challenges. This approach ensures that the added value of the final solution consistently far outweighs its initial investment.

Expansion of Business Led to Expansion of Office Space

PSP’s first office was a small space above an estate agent’s in Bourne. At that time, the company had just one full-time employee, a vision and a willingness to make it happen. 2008 was a challenging time to start a company as it was during the Great Recession where businesses were in survival mode, looking for ways to cut costs.

Skip forward three years to 2011, not only had a decade-long partnership with CIPS formed, our EX-AM software was being utilised at a chartered institute, and our client base grew year-on-year. With this success, we bought a brand-new office at Spalding Office Park, which was triple the size of our original workspace.

The office was named Carver House to merge the first three letters of Joe’s and Brett’s surnames (Caruso & Verde).

By this point, we had become an EPiServer Partner, Microsoft Silver Partner, established a separate testing and customer service function to our development team, and had an impressive portfolio of work, including websites with membership and events functionality and an impressive management system for NEBOSH.

Our products consisted of:

  • VISION CRM: A fully integrated, customisable CRM platform that includes MIS and QMS

  • EX-AM Portal: An off-the-shelf IT system built to manage the full assessment life cycle

  • Outlook Tracker: Email tracking software that measured response times, performance in a shared mailbox and root cause of company emails

By 2016, even more business growth led to purchasing the adjoining building to double our office space. From this, we built a state-of-the-art 18-seater boardroom with conferencing equipment and a large touchscreen monitor. The extra office space was used for our PSP Agile IT team and today it houses our very own digital transformation workspace, which has its own wireless conferencing suite so our teams can collaborate with the client project teams.

Record Turnover Led to Highest Staff Count

At the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, we had an annual turnover of £1m, with 14 employees. Three years later, our turnover has almost tripled, leading to our highest number of employees (31*) and we are hiring for three more*.

(*correct as of July 2023)

Our staff count includes:

  • 11 Developers

  • 10 Testers (UAT, Manual and Automated)

  • 7 IT Managers (Mid-Level and Director-Level)

It’s an incredible number to mark our 15th year in business; especially when considering that Joe and Brett envisaged a company with 11 members of staff!

2023 & Beyond

Today, PSP is a fully end-to-end software development and IT management outsourcing company that works with chartered institutes, membership bodies and education providers, among many others.

We are proud to house a diverse and deep range of talent under one roof in Spalding. As well as our Microsoft Gold accredited developers, we have business analysts, software testers, project managers and IT directors who all provide outsourced services to our clients.

In 2022, we built an online Training Academy, so all our developers and customer support team are well-trained on each of our clients’ systems. We’re proud to be a double Microsoft Gold partner in development and integration, as well as Cyber Essentials Certified.

This year, we re-branded our PSP Business Services to PSP Agile IT. The new name reflects the flexible IT outsourcing we provide to companies who want a Director of IT on a part-time basis. This is an area of the business we will be expanding in the coming months as businesses look to keep costs down while investing in and safeguarding their technology at the same time.

 CEO Joe Verde said: “When Brett and I started PSP all them years ago, we wanted a business that was big enough to employ 11 members of staff. Fast forward 15 years, we now employ more than three times that amount and have branched out into several markets by providing several different services within the IT field.

Although the internet itself started in the 60s, the WWW was only made available for public use 30 years ago in April 1993. That means PSP has been in existence for half of the time the public has been using the internet. When you think of it like that, it shows just how long we’ve been going and how established PSP is in the IT sector.”