Beech Tree Private Equity today announces a significant investment in BCN Group, a fast-growing provider of IT managed solutions to UK businesses. Beech Tree Private Equity has been looking to invest in the sector due to the rapid growth in demand for the provision of cloud managed services and will support BCN with its plans to scale up rapidly in this highly fragmented market. According to industry forecasts, the CAGR across public cloud is expected to be 20% over the next five years.BCN Group, headquartered near Manchester Airport, provides a full range of IT managed services to support UK businesses. BCN provides on-premise, hybrid and cloud hosting solutions, cloud migration services, application support, voice solutions, data management, hardware sales and maintenance services to hundreds of customers across the country. BCN has a strong focus on technical knowledge and customer services, which has led to BCN's sector leading Net Promoter Score of 89. BCN has also built an end-to-end, scalable management platform and ERP system, which automates tasks and manages customer interactions, ticketing and engineering workflows efficiency.The company has appointed a new CFO as part of the deal, Julian Llewellyn, whose prior sector knowledge and acquisition experience will help to support the current management team in executing its buy-and-build strategy. Matt Lovell the former CTO of Pulsant has also joined the board of BCN as a Non-Executive Director to help the business to further develop its cloud services proposition as well supporting the acquisition integration strategy. Adam Rudd and Andy Marsh from Beech Tree Private Equity have joined the board as Non-Executive Directors also.

Commenting on the investment in BCN Group, Adam Rudd, Director at Beech Tree Private Equity said "We are delighted to invest in BCN. There are several growth drivers impacting this sector and it is clear to us that BCN is well set to benefit from these over the next five years. After meeting many businesses in the space, we were really impressed with BCN. We believe the ambition held by the management team, the sales and customer centric culture and most importantly, the technical knowledge held within the business sets BCN apart from its competition. We are excited to support the management team in pursuing a buy and build strategy – this is an area in which we have a lot of experience in, having helped many of our other invested businesses to pursue similar strategies. We are really pleased that both Julian and Matt are joining the Board as their sector and acquisition experience will be very valuable in helping to deliver our strategy."

Simon Kelf, CEO of BCN comments on the investment "I am thrilled that Beech Tree Private Equity have invested in our business. We have built a strong relationship with the Beech Tree team over the past few past months and their experience, connections and knowledge of the space will help us scale to the next level. Matt and I believe that we have built a market leading business focusing on what's important: technical knowhow and our customers' needs. With Beech Tree's assistance we will now accelerate our organic growth through further expansion of both our sales team and our cloud services proposition. With Beech Tree supporting us, we are now looking forward to embarking on our buy and build strategy in order to accelerate our growth even further".

Funders of the transaction:Beech Tree Private Equity (Andy Marsh, Adam Rudd, Ben Cartwright)

Advisers to the transaction:Advisers to Beech Tree and Newco:Financial Due Diligence – Dow Schofield Watts (Ed Brentnall, Nick Bolton)Legal – DLA Piper (James Kerrigan, Christopher Wilson, Alexandra Holden)Tax – KPMG (Steven Heath, David Lewin)Management due diligence – i2i HQ Ltd (Michael Finnigan)Insurance Due Diligence – Vista Insurance Group (Peter Warburton, Gavin Ruben)Advisers to the Company:Corporate Finance – Clearwater CF (Carl Houghton, Michael Loudon, Shahbaz Qasim)Legal – Turner Parkinson (David Easdown, David Hayes)