Meet the MSP boss who started her company in a library

PCL Group founder Jeanette Forbes opens up on the origins of the £1.5m revenue MSP and why she has handed the reins over to her children

Not many companies can say they were started by their founder paying £1 an hour to use the PCs in the local library, but that's exactly how Aberdeen-based PCL Group got its start in life.

Founder Jeanette Forbes - who was recently awarded an OBE on the New Year's Honours list for her services to charity, technology and business - started the company in 2000 after being made redundant from her previous role as a secretary at an oil and gas company.

During her time there, she had become "the go-to person" to fix computer problems, despite not having any experience of technology at the time. A colleague encouraged her to pursue IT as a career, but in the late 90s, very few women were working in the tech industry.

"I really don't know why I became the go-to person because I didn't have any tech experience, but pressing control, alt, delete seemed to fix everything. So they kept coming to me because they seemed to think I knew what I was doing," she recalled.

"The HR chap who was in that company said to me ‘you should study this because you know what you're doing and you seem to have a natural aptitude for computing'.

"At the time when [the tech industry] was starting to come to the fore [the late 90s], it was absolutely unheard of for any woman to even contemplate getting into a male domain like computing."

Forbes took the remainder of her redundancy package - £100 - and decided to set up an IT and cabling company. Forbes based PCL out of the library for the first three months of its existence, juggling motherhood and studying computer science alongside it.

She quickly secured a loyal client base from her connections in the oil and gas industry and moved into an office after three months, operating as a one-woman band for 18 months until her late husband joined her two years later.

In its first year, PCL secured a £250,000 contract for one of the North Sea rigs.

The MSP counts Microsoft, HP and HPE among its vendor partners and now generates revenue of £1.5m, according to Forbes, adding that this year will see it move to new offices and add five more heads to its 25-strong workforce.

"We're looking to move offices and acquire more staff because we need to do that. We're also looking to develop new sectors within our organisation that we don't currently cover," she stated.

"We already have a web development side, we already do hardware, software, maintenance, supply provision; we already captured all that under our existing offering for tech. So we'll look at the provisions that we can enhance and see where we can go from there."

Forbes recently handed the day-to-day running of the company to her two children as she pursues new ventures, including creating GoHawk - the "fastest flight algorithm in the world" and joining the board of a tech company specialising in gas hydrates.

She will remain CEO of PCL but her role will be to "look strategically outwards".

"I've got fresh blood in PCL, the youngsters now come in with great ideas and they can push it forward to wherever it wants to be," she said of her decision to step back from day-to-day operations.

"We're a global company - we serve Australia, Singapore and Trinidad -we don't have offices there, but because of remote applications now we can look after these places without having to travel there.

"The plus side for me in stepping away from the operational side is that I'm looking more on the strategic angle now and figure out what's the future looking like for PCL group in the next five to 10 years. We've got big ambitions."