Five years of Amiqus
A message for anyone once told ‘it will never work’
By Callum Murray
Amiqus turned five this week. It felt like a milestone worth pausing to consider.
Sadly, Sir Trevor McDonald wasn’t at hand to recount key moments or roll out the people instrumental to our success and growth in a This is your life fashion.
Instead, I’ve picked out a few critical moments and people from our journey, 2015 to now.
Why are we Amiqus / Ami-kus?
Around twelve years ago I experienced the civil court process pursuing unpaid debts owed to me in a previous business. It was complex, time consuming, expensive and cost me my business alongside ten other jobs. I certainly wasn’t living my best lyfe in my early twenties.
I assumed that the likelihood of court reform and digitisation of the legal profession wasn’t going to be driven by the court system, the judiciary or solicitors. So I set about making some direct systems change by starting a company. Solicitors and the system needed help and Amiqus would become their friend.
So when we incorporated as a company, we derived the name from a phonetic combination of the latin phrase, Amicus curiae, meaning friend of the court.
Good people are at the heart of good things
I dug out a business plan from 2016 yesterday.
It featured Alisdair Gunn as an external advisor. I was introduced to him by John Hughes from Business Gateway Edinburgh in their Leith office. Luckily for me, you’d struggle to find a more helpful, supportive and generous couple of people. Their modus operandi is selflessly helping people get started in business. The economic benefits, jobs and positive outcomes happen afterwards.
Before working with Alisdair, I had an idea that I was consistently told wouldn’t work, wasn’t scalable, and wasn’t viable. I’d applied for all sorts of support and funding and been knocked back.
I had an idea that I was consistently told wouldn’t work, wasn’t scalable, and wasn’t viable.
Alisdair worked for PA consulting at the time and was involved in supporting the digital sector and engaging with early stage companies. Thankfully he was interested in Amiqus, opening up his contact book and making introductions that made all the difference when the odds were stacked against us.
A year or so later and with new found early successes under our belt, I remember pitching Amiqus to Sir Sandy Crombie at an RBS office with inordinately thick-piled, deep blue carpets. It wasn’t my finest hour and he told me I’d not have made it out the lift if I were on Dragon’s Den.
But it worked out in the end with Sir Sandy, as he’s now our Chairman.
In retrospect, I started Amiqus from a place of privilege. What I lacked in financial capital I could make up for thanks to people offering to help out, lend a hand or spare some time to listen. Although I had next to zero grounding in tech and little in the way of network, the people who took a punt on Amiqus looked quite like me, sounded a bit like me and recognised the traits of someone who was determined and resilient. Someone that wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Here’s a pitch from around that time with our original plans (shortly before we came up with our name). This plan was formed over a burrito in the West End of Edinburgh with my mate Robbie. He was part of Freeagent at the time, a team that Amiqus both respect, admire and learn from.
Robbie isn’t a bad egg either, even though he is from Linlithgow / Lithgy. I don’t hold it against him though, given that I’m from the nearby promised land known as Bo’ness.
There’s not really any easy stage when you’re relentlessly building something new. I recognise after five years of non stop effort to get to where we’re at, I certainly wouldn’t be here without a huge amount of belief and support from a wide range of people across the early stage ecosystem and support networks.
I hope there will be a few of those people that read this blog and recognise the part they’ve played. I remember you all.
What have we done then?
Our approach to building value and trust for the long term has remained consistent over the past five years. You typically won’t hear us shouting about external investment but instead, the projects we support or the things we’re involved in that make an impact.
Two recent examples being Proxy Address and Scottish Tech Army; we’re really proud to be involved with.
In financial terms, we’ve grown revenue from 2017–2020 by aroud 50x. Broken down, that’s:
6.4x 2017–2018
4.0x 2018–2019
1.8x 2019–2020
Rather than be impressive, this rate of growth is actually a little below our projections. It has raised a few eyebrows with one or two of our investors.
This has been an important lesson in setting expectations. Set them too low, you’re not ambitious enough. Set them too high and you have a much bigger problem; CEO’s who miss their targets don’t remain in their role for too long and their company valuation typically takes a sizeable hit.
But we’ve weathered the eyebrow-raising storms so far and now, elusive enterprise opportunities in both the private and public sectors are converting.
Where are we now?
We’ve gone on to build the structural foundations that enable people to access help, support and transact online across sectors.
I’ve also had some help articulating myself thanks to the good people at EIE and the exceptional Maryanne Johnston who has worked with us over the years to help me speak clearly and concisely, which is no mean feat.
We’re a distributed team of thirty and our clients are running around fifteen thousand checks monthly. We continue to build and do so with a focus on pushing to a sustainable position.
Recently we’ve been scaling our approach into the public sector thanks to winning Civtech 4.0. This has led to a very clear focus on making sure we meet the accessibility standard WCAGv2.1 and enable delivery across sectors to support the needs of staff onboarding.
We’ve stayed true to our values, support our team and work purposefully towards our objectives.
We’ve stayed true to our values, support our team and work purposefully towards our objectives. It’s not been sunshine and rainbows every day, we’ve had challenges to overcome but continue to build value for the long term and learn as we go.
What about Covid?
Covid-19 has brought about a huge acceleration of attitudes and momentum towards the challenge at hand but there’s still a lot to be done. It’s fairly obvious that no one particularly cares or dreams about owning their own digital ID. But they do care when paper and process get in the way of accessing help, solving a problem, moving home or getting a job. It’s also annoying when life feels like one big, repetitive application process.
Covid-19 has brought about a huge acceleration of attitudes and momentum towards the challenge at hand but there’s still a lot to be done.
How about a lofty, deep and meaningful piece of advice to finish with?
It’s been five years so I’ve logically covered five things above. If you’d like to scratch a bit more below the surface of a Medium blog you can follow us on twitter @amiqus or soak up our marketing site at amiqus.co. If you’re interested in how we build and do things you can read in far more detail about that in our Labs notebook.
If you’d like to join the Amiqus team on our journey, the best place is to email work@amiqus.co.
If you’d like to speak to us about a problem that we might be able to solve for you, we’ll be happy to chat. You can phone us on +44131 513 9757.
Thanks for your interest in Amiqus and here’s to the next five years.
Callum
