Nigel Wright and the business that grew by choosing less

The £2,000 beginning

Nigel Wright spent a year cutting wood before he found his way into technology sales. The inducement was wonderfully uncomplicated: someone he knew was earning four times his pay in England, with commission on top. A career can begin with a calling. A better wage can also make a persuasive opening argument.

He had left home at 18, returned to Northern Ireland for a spell in his twenties, worked in telecoms and travelled the world at 29. At 33, he started a business in Manchester with £2,000. Friends and the city’s Northern Irish community helped draw him there; he later acknowledged the role of luck in the choice. This was a beginning assembled from work, travel and people he knew.

Converge Technology Specialists, later CTS, was founded in 2006. Its eventual identity as a provider devoted to legal work can make that destination seem inevitable. Wright’s own account supplies a useful correction: the decisive change came seven years after the business began. There was a substantial period of running a company before he found the version of it that would grow faster.

Seven years in, a smaller market

In 2013, Wright and his management team chose to concentrate on cloud services for the legal sector. They already had law firm clients. They could see demand forming around those clients’ particular requirements, and they decided to reorganise the service around them. The awkward part was knowing that other industries could still have paid for their work.

Choosing a market sounds tidy on a presentation slide. In a small business, it means accepting that some perfectly respectable enquiries may no longer fit. Wright explicitly recognised that risk. CTS would be making itself less relevant to some buyers while trying to become more useful to a particular set of them.

By September 2018, Converge had appeared in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100. Wright described annual revenue growth of 50 per cent over the preceding three years and named MW Solicitors, Langleys and BTO among its clients. He credited the decision with giving the team time to understand legal processes and build relationships. The narrowing had given customers a clearer reason to choose the company.

The client who wanted someone on site

A more revealing measure of that proposition came from Poole Alcock. In 2017, the law firm extended and expanded its hosted services contract with Converge TS after three years. It added a member of the provider’s staff on site. A company selling remotely hosted computing had earned a request for a person in the building.

Poole Alcock’s account emphasised responsiveness, protection of client data, disaster recovery and the freedom to concentrate on delivering legal services. These are concrete purchasing reasons. The law firm was describing the work it wanted to stop worrying about, and the confidence it had developed in the people doing it.

For Wright, a renewal that grew in scope was especially satisfying. It put the argument for specialisation into an ordinary commercial decision. Familiarity with a customer’s world could turn a supplier into someone the customer asked to do more. The cloud might be remote; responsibility still needed a recognisable face.

Black tie, then a seat at the table

Wright also put himself inside the profession’s social and working life. He was on the judging panel for the 2015 Manchester Legal Awards, where Converge TS was a principal sponsor alongside Moneypenny. An awards-night photograph places him on stage with Bernadette Bennett as Michael Redfern QC speaks. There are less festive ways to demonstrate an interest in your customers.

The following year, Converge organised a Trailblazers conference in Manchester. Its programme brought together Joy Kingsley of JMW, Ed Fletcher of Fletchers, Richard Hodkinson of DWF and Paul Hinchliffe of Bott & Co. Wright shared the opening introduction with BusinessCloud’s Chris Maguire. Growth, culture and technology all had places on the agenda.

These events give some substance to the word relationships. They involved showing up, introducing people and taking part in discussions that extended beyond a hosting contract. A specialist can learn by listening to customers separately. Convening a room of them offers another education, with coffee and a timetable attached.

The company acquires some company

Tenzing’s investment, agreed at the end of 2017 and announced in January 2018, backed the existing management team led by Wright and technical director Andrew Taylor. The plans included product development, sales investment, acquisitions and international expansion. CTS now had financial backing for a broader programme than winning its next customer.

The management continuity mattered. Wright remained the founder running the business, with support aimed at expanding its capabilities and reach. Private equity introduced another set of participants into a company whose original appeal had been its focus. The practical question became how to add resources without losing the familiarity customers valued.

In November 2020, CTS bought Sprout IT and City Business Solutions. Both were legal specialist managed service providers, and the combined group would operate under the CTS brand. The acquired management teams were to remain, helping with growth and integration. The purchases extended an existing commitment to the legal market.

Sprout brought a London legal-district base and round-the-clock support operations in New Zealand. Its founders, Danny Killeen and Matt Torrens, had built their business around service to legal clients. That detail makes the transaction easier to picture: CTS was bringing together another working organisation, with its own founders, staff, customer habits and geography.

Acquisitions also required a different kind of work from selling IT. WTA’s work for CTS included researching potential businesses, approaching owners, arranging meetings and supporting offers. Wright and other directors met prospective sellers alongside Tenzing. Each completed deal was preceded by a series of conversations in which another founder had to decide whether the combination made sense.

A server is only half the conversation

The Tiger Eye acquisition in September 2022 brought a further change. Tiger Eye, founded by Dave Wilson in 2005, specialised in iManage document management. Its work covered technical support, training, consultancy and custom development. CTS could add application expertise to its cloud and infrastructure services.

The customer problem was easy to recognise: the people supporting the platform and the people supporting the software did not always understand each other’s territory. Wright wanted CTS to bridge that gap. A law firm buying technology needs the pieces to function together, however neatly the supplier contracts divide them.

Tiger Eye was to continue operating independently, with its senior management staying. Wilson’s emphasis on collaboration complemented the service rationale for the purchase. The proposed advantage lay in connecting two kinds of expertise while retaining the people who had developed them. Buying a specialist brings little benefit if its special knowledge walks out of the door.

By July 2023, Wright was discussing a five-year ambition to become a digital transformation partner for law firms globally. He said CTS was heading towards £30 million turnover that year. That was a statement about direction and an anticipated figure, rather than a completed international expansion or a reported year-end result.

“The market wants different stuff from us,” he said. His explanation centred on simplifying complex IT environments and helping fee earners work more effectively. CTS would have to change again, even though its existing approach had enabled substantial growth. The founder who had found an advantage in focus was confronting changing expectations within the same chosen market.

“The market wants different stuff from us.”

Nigel Wright · July 2023

Growth, followed by a different ending

There were signs of demand for the wider offering. In September 2023, Tiger Eye described increased interest from American and Canadian firms, along with wider adoption of its tools. Wright pointed to its ability to provide iManage services in-house and to the team’s customer service. The international ambition had some concrete activity behind it, though the group’s eventual story would take another course.

Wright left CTS in November 2023. His CTS Group Management directorship ended on 2 November. Later that month, CTS suffered a cyber incident that prevented customers from accessing core systems and data. The order of those events belongs in any account of his time with the company.

In April 2024, the managed service provider division was sold through administration to Bluecube, an Ekco company, with continuity of customer services a stated priority. Tiger Eye, which had maintained its own profit and loss account and was outside the administration, separated from CTS and continued with Tenzing’s backing.

The outcome complicates an otherwise convenient growth story. A sector focus, repeat customers and acquisitions can explain how a business expands; they do not settle every question about its future. For clients and staff, the later transaction meant another transition. For a profile of the founder, it marks the boundary between his years leading CTS and the subsequent history of the business.

What a specialist leaves behind

Wright’s professional affiliations also include TeamFeePay. He has written about law firm technology, including the approaching end of Windows Server 2003 support and whether IT should be treated as a cost or profit centre. Those subjects share a practical concern: helping a buyer decide what a technical change means for the business.

The titles are a reminder of the work beneath a founder’s growth figures. A customer needs a deadline explained, a risk put into proportion or a purchase justified. Making those matters comprehensible is part of selling a service, and part of being answerable for it afterwards. Specialisation gives those conversations a vocabulary both parties can use.

Wright’s distinctive decision remains the one made in 2013, after seven years of operating. He chose to know a smaller set of customers better. Much followed from that choice: a clearer offer, outside investment, acquisitions and the ambition to serve firms further afield. It is a useful piece of entrepreneurial history precisely because it arrived after the beginning. He had already started a company. He still had to decide what it should become.