Marathon CEO on company rebrand, building a new head office and moving to a direct sales model

Former OCSL director Iain Maclean opens up on future plans for fast-growing MSP

Marathon Professional Services has rebranded to become Marathon Managed Services as the business repositions itself following its acquisition by two former OCSL execs last year.

The Marathon business was acquired in July last year by former OCSL MD and founder Tim Thrower and former project services director Iain Maclean following its sale to Cancom in 2018.

Speaking to CRN, Maclean, who is now CEO of Marathon, said that the rebrand better reflects the nature of Marathon's business today.

He said that Marathon won three very large managed services contracts over the last six months, and now generates around 60 to 65 per cent its business from managed services.

"We were very successful over the last six months in winning three or four large managed services contracts. If we look at the mix of the business, when we were doing the rebrand it would've been remiss for us not to look at the mix of the business and say, 'we're not really about professional services any more we're a managed services company'," he said.

The CEO added that professional services will still be a key part of Marathon's offering and has become one of three pillars to the business alongside managed services and cybersecurity.

Maclean said the rebrand is the product of period of supercharged growth for the MSP - with its headcount jumping from 27 to 70 people over the last eight months alone.

"We've grown massively over the last six months, which has been a really good success story and one that we're quite shocked that we've achieved," he said.

The growth has prompted Marathon to invest in a new office to provide space for its larger workforce. Based in Leatherhead, the new location will house Marathon's client centre, 24/7 support desk, network operations centre and security operations centre.

"We've currently got just under 2,000 square feet which is far too small for the amount of people we've got," said Maclean.

"We've built an 8,000 square foot customer experience centre that has got a coffee bar area, new meeting rooms, we've filled in the NOC and SOC above that. So it's going to look very cool."

Maclean said that Marathon has traditionally been a white-label services company that sells its services through a reseller channel. With the rebrand, Marathon is aiming to focus more of its business on selling direct to end users.

Now more than half of Marathon's business goes direct to end users, said Maclean.

"As long as there's a demand for it, we'll keep the white label business.

"But that wasn't the direction that we were finding the opportunities in. The white label business is still very important to us and we have handled that very sensitively with the clients, because there could've been nervousness for them with us going direct. But we've handled it right and they've all stuck with us," he said.

Aside from opening a new office later this year and rebranding the business, Marathon has also become a Gold-level Microsoft partner and secured new accreditations including ISO 27001 across the whole organisation.

Maclean said that growing Marathon is an entirely different experience to his previous role growing OCSL.

"If you look at OCSL Cancom as it is now, if you peel back the layers its just predominantly a reseller. We're not a reseller - we're not going to do hardware and we're not leading with hardware," he said.

"The amount of trust and the professionalism at Marathon has to be on another scale. For me, it's a big learning curve. We learned a lot of the mistakes over at Cancom and I think we're fortunate with that because now we've been able to grow much quicker at Marathon."