‘Our revenues in Q4 were our best revenues to date’: Lemongrass CEO on recent appointment

Tim Wintrip talks SAP, projected growth, and leadership mantra

On 17 December, Lemongrass appointed Tim Wintrip as its new CEO, taking over from Mike Rosenbloom.

Wintrip joins at an exciting time for the company, after it closed 2024 “with record revenue” according to Rosenbloom.

As the freshly appointed CEO stepped into his new role on 1 January, CRN sat down with him to understand where the service provider is headed and how he is planning to sustain this “record” growth.

Wintrip tells CRN that since he joined the company as CSO in 2021, Lemongrass’ revenue has increased “by approximatively 30 per cent year-over-year.”

“I would see that continuing through next year, maybe getting a boost, thanks to the activity around transformation and cloud.

“The business is very healthy.

“Our revenues in Q4 were our best revenues to date.

“The plan is to keep that momentum going, while also adding to it with new offerings around modernisation, BTP, clean core and data.”

Even though the software-enabled services provider has achieved most of its growth organically, Wintrip doesn’t “rule out” any buyouts this year, as the company has been acquisitive in the past.

“Three years ago, we were only AWS, and we wanted to become more multicloud,” he says.

“We decided to acquire a company called Wharfedale, which really helped us leverage skill sets and move the ball a bit faster in that area, specifically with Microsoft.

“If I look at 2025 with the focus around some of the micro services architectures and data, there's a possibility that we might make an acquisition. It wouldn't be off the cards.”

But potential acquisitions aren’t the only thing on Wintrip’s mind, as territorial consolidation will be a key focus during his leadership.

In APAC, the reseller wants to focus “a little bit more on Japan.”

“It's a huge market, where we’ve won a couple of large Japanese clients, on which we’ll focus further in 2025.

The Reading-based business also has its eyes on NORAM, as 2024 has been “a great year for [Lemongrass] in Canada.”

He adds: “We have lots of US customers, but last year we won two of the largest SAP projects in Canada.

“The plan is really to piggyback off that and expand in the Canadian market.”

The British business also wants to consolidate its presence in Europe, especially in the Nordics.

“We've had a couple of good wins in the Nordics with two of the largest telecom infrastructure providers.

“One of them we helped migrate to AWS, and the other one we helped migrate to Google.

“I think we'll do a little bit more in the Nordics in 2025.”

In addition to the Nordics “the Netherlands and DACH” are other territories the business has its eyes on.

Lemongrass yet to have any activity in countries like Italy, Spain and France.

Regarding the UK, the company’s home country represents “a significant chunk” of the business in Europe, “probably about half” of its revenue, according to the CEO.

The service provider also counts “a large delivery centre in South Africa” with “some notable clients.”

Read on to learn more about Lemongrass’ strategy in 2025…

Plans for growth

But what will generate the growth and territorial consolidation Wintrip has in mind?

Traditionally, the reseller’s mission has been to “help customers maximise their investments with SAP and cloud,” according to him.

Looking ahead, it wants to “modernise SAP.”

“For the next two to three years, we want to help customers modernise and transform their SAP estates as economically sensibly as possible.”

To achieve its goal, the company will do something it has never done before – begin expanding its resale footprint across more SAP solutions as a response to growing demand from its clients.

“Our plan over the next six to 12 months is to really drive the SAP transformation and help our customers get to S/4 and what SAP called Cloud ERP, which is really SAP running in SAP’s ecosystem.

“Over the next 12 months, we want to make that as frictionless as possible.

“SAP talks about something called the clean core, which is taking all the customisations from the past and cleaning them up so that you can move to a more SAS-based operating model for SAP to drive innovation quicker and leverage new features.

“What we're going to be doing heavily this year is building solutions, services, technology, effectively updating our Lemongrass cloud platform solution to be able to help with that journey.

“We are seeing lots of customers, even really big and complex ones, looking at the SAP, Cloud ERP, RISE journey, as opposed to going into cloud native.

“So instead of running SAP on AWS, it's running it on RISE.

“We're tweaking our offerings to embrace that.

“This year for us is about really building out new capabilities skills, taking our current platforms for orchestration and automation and adapting them to work with things like BTP, for instance.”

Keep reading to learn more about Wintrip’s mantra as a leader…

Leading in style

As each leader comes with their own style, rooted from the successes and obstacles they might have met during their journey, Wintrip’s strategy is “to lead from the front.”

“I like to bring people along with me.

“If we need to change direction or to do something important, we'll get the team together, and we'll make a decision.

“My favourite thing is talking to the team, but also spending time with customers.

“My mantra, and it's something that I'm very passionate about, is around driving customer obsession, customer focus.

“If we do that, we will be successful.”

But beyond personal experience, one’s inspiration also comes from others.

The new CEO mentions two people who deeply inspired him throughout his journey, including the former chairman of Lemongrass, “a chap by the name of Rodney Rogers.”

“He was the reason I joined Lemongrass.

“He was a bit of a force of nature. He was incredibly driven, very direct.

“You didn't want to get on the wrong side of him, but he was also someone that would provide lots of coaching to me.

“Unfortunately, Rodney passed away very recently, which was a real loss to all of us.

“I was also in a stint with VMware, and I had the privilege of working directly with Pat Gelsinger.

“We had a number of customer sessions together.

“I really enjoyed his style. He was incredibly knowledgeable, incredibly open, and always welcomed people to challenge him.

“Rodney was more of a startup entrepreneur. Pat, on the other hand, did one of the biggest jobs in the world. I was sad to see him step down at Intel.”