OUTCO: A company with an abundance of history and ambitious plans for the future

The amazing journey of an organisation that has grown and grown begins in 2004, when the winter services business was formed, becoming the foundations of our business today.

Offering winter services including gritting and snow clearance the organisation grew with immense pace, utilising technology to provide a transparent approach to the market. Rapid growth saw clients using our services in the FM sector, across the NHS and works with HMRC.

In 2008 our surfacing and infrastructure business was formed, with our expertise and knowledge within the retail sector we focused our specialism around car park refurbishment, working with leading brands such as Tesco. Our unique offering was our understanding of these markets, our ability to delivery a safe quality service in a live environment, minimisning disruption and ensuring our clients could continue with day to day business activities.

As we continued to grow, our emphasis was to provide our client with a complete service, one that made maintenance of outdoor spaces simple. In 2014 saw the launch of our grounds services business, a service arm identified as required by our clients yet underserved. Our grounds business offered clients a complete grounds maintenance package, tailor-made to your requirements, from grass cutting and pruning to litter picking and knotweed control, we ensured we were the go to company for outdoor maintenance provisions.

Powered by smart technology

The last seven years has seen sustainable growth for us as a group, additional acquisitions in grounds services and the launch of our drainage service has enhanced our service offering to our clients all powered by smart technology, providing client the visibility to what works have been completed on their site and when. Nimbus uses integrated tracking and telematics software in conjunction with an algorithmic decision-making platform to ensure our teams are at the right place at the right time, delivering the right service. Working with Nimbus, Pulse gives our clients live service information in the palm of their hands – alongside the ability to communicate directly with our teams. This time-saving tool keeps you fully abreast of service delivery while freeing up time to focus on other duties. Pulse tracks the operator rather than the vehicle, with such concepts as geofencing built-in to enable further route optimization for operator delivery.

Mark Rogerson Chair of OUTCO.

What does the future look like for OUTCO?

OUTCO currently has three service lines, Surfacing and infrastructure, Grounds and Winter services, within each of those service lines there are multiple service activities, take surfacing and infrastructure for example, within that service line we have specific service activities such as surfacing, drainage, coating, potholing, in winter services, de-icing, snow clearing, in grounds, lawn mowing, forestry clearance, when you add the OUTCO offering up there is over 30 different services we provide. As we look to expand into areas that we currently do not work in, yet we know our clients have a demand for, for instance security, electrical vehicle points, window and fascia cleaning, we are going to have to look at acquisitions in these areas for growth.

We are very fortunate to be backed by a private equity group, we have already identified four or five additional key service lines that our customers are already asking us to provide for them, for OUTCO to achieve our goal, to provide a complete service to our customer, these services this may come through acquisition.

We will also grow organically within our existing service lines, currently we are growing at one of the fastest rates organically across the United Kingdom, operating in over 7,500 sites, less than three years ago this number was 3,500, but further investment is required to enhance our offering and provide the complete service package we are aiming to achieve for our clients.

During our journey, OUTCO have built a very efficient technology platform that allows us to both integrate acquisitions quickly, but more importantly embed them onto our technology package instantly, our customers will therefore see an enhancement in the data visibility of the services we are providing, we will be doing a lot of this over the next three to four years in a similar way that organisations that have consolidated services in this sector have done but predominantly in the indoor work space.

As we come out of this COVID pandemic the outdoor space for most organisation is going to become highly relevant, lots of our clients are already opening up their terraces and redundant outdoor areas, providing more space for people to spend outside rather than inside in cafes, we believe we are going to see a revolution in the outdoor space.