You recently took on the new role as Co-CEO: can you tell us about this change and why it came about?

2024 was a groundbreaking year for the Empowered Group, with new strategic opportunities and significant growth. To best support our ongoing growth in 2025 and beyond and shape our organisation for the future we brought in a new Managing Director, Tony Everson, who joined the team in March. In this pivotal position, Tony will have responsibility for managing the day-to-day business operation, developing our teams, processes and governance.

Tony brings over 25 years’ experience and expertise in delivering IT support solutions to the market, having held key operational, commercial and sales positions.

With Tony on board, we will be able to focus our energies on driving the next phase of strategic development across our customers, partners, propositions, teams and success.

Is there a ‘recipe for success’ when channel partners navigate a crowded sector to identify the right partner?

We are often asked by our new channel partners about our value proposition and what makes us different from the rest. In a crowded channel services market, with many similar positioned organisations promoting their own specialist capabilities, it can be hard to choose.

The sector both in the UK and across global channels provides a wide variety of choice and the ‘recipe’ for a successful long-term relationship with partners is generally consistent across the channel.

What is the secret to a successful long-term partnership in the channel?

All our channel partners, whether big or small, generally have four key attributes in common:

1. They all have customers they want to delight
2. They all have solutions and services they want to promote
3. They have an investment in their own people to deliver
4. They all rely upon partners to given them burst capacity and scale, when needed and often on a “just in time” basis!

This is challenging for most service partners to deliver consistently and successfully, and they are always limited by the resources that they have at their fingertips.

How has Empowered succeeded in this space?

We always look to lead with our pedigree in being one of the longest standing and largest “channel only” service providers in the UK today. Over the past twenty years, our invaluable experience gained in delivering large, international complex transformation programmes, combined with our ability to scale with our known, tried and trusted agile delivery model makes us one of the standout “experts” in this field.

To succeed in the long term, is that enough?

Over the last twenty years, we have seen a lot, delivered a lot and gained a lot of knowledge and expertise in what makes a partnership work. For a relationship to thrive, it is not just about filling those delivery gaps for partners; these activities will always be considered tactical by the channel partner and only celebrated in the moment. The key to staying relevant to our partners and front of mind for the longer term is to be seen as an opportunity enhancer by helping them grow their revenues through the partnership, bringing added expertise, capabilities, propositions and innovations to the table and enabling them to enhance their value to their customers.

How do you build trust with a channel partner?

In a services-led relationship, trust is formed, established and grown through proven consistent delivery. Every services provider is only as good as its last engagement, so any provider stretching their delivery capabilities using unproven resources is risky to the relationship and suppliers are better off focusing on what they can confidently deliver.

And what is required to become a strategic, go-to services provider?

To be considered strategic by the partner, this is only possible as close-working, trusted relationships flourish, and the supplier gets to understand more about the partner, their customers and the opportunities they uncover.  By being able to underpin new opportunity growth with added capabilities, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the partner, spotting the gaps and delivering complementary propositions as part of the bigger picture enables the partner to expand their customer conversations, widen their opportunities and ultimately compete and win more. This is vital to driving loyalty to the partnership and ultimately builds a solid platform for long term repeatable relevancy and success.

How do all service providers differentiate themselves from the rest, when the market is already mature?

The future for long term successful partnerships is to drive relevancy through simplicity, through the use of intuitive, service lifecycle tools, delivering real agility for the partner to quote and win, delivering and tracking all the services that the partner needs to support its customer opportunities.

How does Empowered innovate and anticipate partners’ needs?

Since our acquisition of OrderWork in 2014, we have innovated and led from the front via our unique services lifecycle platform “MyOrderWork,” which acts as a core interface for our partner relationships and offers a library of scoped services, ready to be wrapped around our partners’ solutions with full transparency throughout the lifecycle.

The platform continues to simplify services by helping our partners “win more” with agile pricing models, capable of acceptance into delivery at the touch of a button. Whilst this isn’t necessarily a USP on its own, given our almost twenty years’ expertise supporting IT channel partners, we believe providing simple and effective solutions which anticipate our partners’ needs wins the day every time.

Get in touch and find out more about us at www.empowereduk.com
or schedule a call at [email protected].