A bar can give its owner plenty of evidence that people are enjoying themselves. There are customers, drinks and the agreeable noise of money being spent. Jacyn Heavens had those things in Norwich. What troubled him was how little they explained. The room could be busy while the profits remained strangely elusive. Owning the place had supplied him with a business and a question: what, exactly, was happening to the money?
He had wanted food and live music. He discovered that running a bar also required an education in costs, stock and all the unglamorous obligations that arrive after the customer has gone home. In his account of those early days, a good night at the bar did not automatically produce a good result in the accounts. A spreadsheet and a business meeting eventually acquired attractions of their own.
That gap between a lively business and an understood business became the starting point for Epos Now. Heavens founded the company in 2011, from a room above his bar. Fifteen years later, the business was arranging bank facilities of up to £90 million. The distance between those two rooms is considerable. The question connecting them is remarkably ordinary.
A better moment to make the call
Heavens’s education in customers began before the bar. As a teenager, he worked at a sweet counter. Then came PC World, where he worked on tills and moved into selling computers. He remembered being impressed by a customer who could pay cash for a PC. At that point, being able to afford a computer outright seemed an ambition worth having.
Commercial sales followed. In mobile phones, his early performance was poor enough to require a change of approach. He bought a computer and collected information about when contracts were likely to come up for renewal. A call made at the wrong moment was easily dismissed. A call made when somebody actually needed a replacement had a better chance.
“It’s all about timing.”
Jacyn Heavens, on his early phone-sales lesson
The improvement helped him move ahead in sales and into work with Three’s business network. It also established a pattern that would become useful later: find information already sitting around a transaction, then use it to make a better decision. Selling more did not require a louder telephone voice. It required knowing something useful about the person answering.
Returning to the high street appealed to him. Friends had experience promoting events in other venues, and a bar offered a way to put that experience to work in their own place. He had never run one before. That detail would become rather central to the next chapter.
The cost of knowing what was going on
Heavens went looking for a point-of-sale system that could help him understand the business. He even asked at a nearby Pizza Express what it used. The equipment he found could provide useful information, but the price put it beyond what he considered sensible for his own operation.
There was an awkward circularity to the problem. A small owner needed better information to protect cash. Buying access to that information could itself consume a painful amount of cash. Heavens saw other independent businesses in the same position. They needed some of the operational visibility available to larger chains, without making a chain-sized purchase.
Epos Now began with that customer in mind. Cloud software offered a way to make business information accessible beyond a particular terminal. The till could help an owner track sales and stock, rather than merely produce a receipt. The useful outcome was a clearer view of a business whose proprietor could not stand beside every transaction.
His earlier work had taught him to notice when a customer needed a phone. The bar taught him that an owner could be present all evening and still miss something essential. Busy people do not necessarily lack effort. Sometimes they lack a usable account of what their effort produces.
The till acquires possibilities
In 2015, Epos Now launched its POS AppStore. Customers could add applications to fit their own operations. A retailer and a restaurant did not have to want exactly the same things from the same piece of equipment. The idea brought a familiar habit from the phone into a less fashionable corner of business technology.
The company received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation in 2016. That year, Deloitte placed it 30th in its UK Technology Fast 50, recording 597% growth over the ranking period. These were recognitions for a company selling the machinery of other people’s working days: stock control, reporting and the practical business of taking payment.
Growth over Deloitte’s UK Technology Fast 50 ranking period. Epos Now placed 30th.
Historical company growth, not an annual rate.Heavens had entered the sector as a buyer with a problem. That gave the product a concrete test. Could an independent owner afford it, understand it and get something useful from it? An extra feature meant little if making it work required an expensive procession of specialists.
By 2017, the customer list extended beyond independent shops to venues including the Nottingham National Ice Centre and Boxpark in Shoreditch. The original buyer had plenty of company. The operational questions could travel even when the premises looked very different.
Norwich supplies more than the postcode
The business grew outwards while keeping its connection to Norwich. Its relationship with the University of East Anglia brought students and graduates into the company. In 2017, Heavens described internships, alumni in the software team and a graduate programme that formed a substantial part of that team. There were regional technology events, too, where staff could exchange ideas with people outside the office.
In November 2017, the university appointed him its first entrepreneur in residence. His brief included helping students and staff with pitching, launching and scaling businesses. An honorary Doctorate of Science followed in 2018. The relationship had developed from finding people who could help build his company into helping other people think about building theirs.
That advisory work later extended to Tech Nation’s Future Fifty mentor network. His appointment was announced in May 2024. The businesses in that programme face different questions from a first-time bar owner, but growth still supplies ample opportunities to discover what nobody remembered to explain.
His stated ambition has room for that longer view. “I want to build a brand that lasts, with a name people can trust,” he said in 2017. It is a demanding promise for software involved in somebody else’s trading day. Trust has to survive an ordinary Tuesday.
The customer with twelve jobs
Heavens’s description of the merchant remains grounded in the owner’s workload. Someone opening a restaurant also becomes responsible for staffing, payroll and ordering stock. The attractive reason for starting the business has to coexist with a stack of tasks the founder may never have done before. He calls the resulting shortfall a “knowledge gap”.
In 2024, he described using AI through Epos Now’s SideKick platform to help address it. His examples were practical: identifying mistakes or differences in purchasing that an individual operator might struggle to spot alone. This was his account of the opportunity he saw, rather than a measured guarantee that software could remove every reason a business might fail.
He has also learned that doing more can be an expensive substitute for understanding demand. Asked about bad advice, he recalled being told to keep the bar open all the time because somebody might come in. He followed it. Looking back, he thought he should have concentrated on knowing his customers and the hours that suited them.
His view of independent retail has a similar emphasis on specificity. He has argued for products and experiences customers cannot simply obtain from a large online competitor. The owner needs a reason for people to visit, as well as the means to know whether those visits sustain the business.
The money changes shape
Epos Now’s early growth came without outside equity investment. Heavens has repeatedly discussed the value of building a business before giving away ownership. By June 2025, the company was reporting turnover of £117 million for FY2025, compared with £59 million for FY2023, alongside its inclusion in the FEBE Growth 100. In September, he was named CEO of the Year at the BDO Private Business Awards.
June 2026 brought a different financing milestone: an agreement with HSBC UK for up to £90 million in facilities. The structure matters. It comprised a £55 million committed revolving credit facility and a £35 million accordion facility. The combined headline describes available and potential borrowing arrangements, rather than an equity investment or a cheque already spent.
The stated plans included expansion in North America and Europe and further investment in business technology. A company that began by helping an owner see his costs now needed financial room for its own next decisions.
The original bar remains the useful place to end. Heavens had wanted to host a good evening. Running the place obliged him to ask harder questions about what happened afterwards. Epos Now grew from his attempt to answer them. Somewhere behind another busy counter, an owner is still doing the sums.