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UK September Report
Happy Birthday! Inclusive Technology is five years old today!
Inclusive Technology began on 1st September 1996 - five years ago today!
Now we have two active companies in the UK and we are starting up a US company, Inclusive TLC Inc. in Boonton, New Jersey.
Inclusive Technology Ltd produces two catalogues a year of all that is best in Special Needs IT resources in the UK.
 Another pallet of ICTS NOF Training Units is unloaded at out Delph offices |
Inclusive Consultancy and Training Ltd (ICT) organizes training, exhibitions and conferences in the UK. ICT is currently very much involved in "Severe and Complex SEN" NOF training as part of the ICTS Consortium of ten Special Needs organizations. |
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| Setting up in New Jersey: Our offices and Tom Caine the company president. | |||
Inclusive TLC Inc. has just completed the build out of its New Jersey offices shown above. We are getting ready for a late October 2001 catalogue and full operation starts on 1st November. Tom Caine, who will lead this new corporation for us, is organizing the whole thing.
Businesses start more slowly than oil tankers. Inclusive TLC will haemorrhage money at first. 125,000 catalogues will be printed in Ohio and mailed to teachers and occupational therapists and speech and language pathologists across the United States. There is no way of doing this more slowly or cheaply. Happily IT and ICT are doing reasonably well and should be able to provide the $350,000 of start-up funding we will need.
We don't have a choice. Computer resources are a global business. IntelliTools, AbleNet and Don Johnston provide the excellent resources they do at the price they do because they can spread development costs across a population of 300 million people. We need to do that too.
Listen to Q1043 "New York's ONLY classic rock station" and at least half of the music is British. We can succeed in the US when we offer ground-breaking products. Some SwitchIt! Products are already available in The US (published for us by IntelliTools) and they do very well. Writing with Symbols is available from Mayer-Johnson and sells in hundreds. John Crick is establishing Clicker 4 from his new base in Seattle. To this we can add Atkinson Vari-Tech computer tables, Penny and Giles rollers, our SwitchBox, Switch Board and keyguards, the LaraMera software we publish in English, the expanding range of Inclusive Technology software and much, much, more.
Inclusive TLC should really rock!
Benchmarking in Britain
Part of my job in the UK is to keep an eye on our colleagues and competitors serving education. It is important to us to know what REM, AVP, TAG, Sherston, Widgit, SEMERC and Crick are doing, as well as the bigger players like Granada Learning Ltd and Research Machines PLC. I probably need to explain why we need to do this.
It's a bit like helping out at a children's party. You not only need to know that some of the children want jelly, you need to know if the other adult helpers are already bringing in the jelly. Should you be focusing on the cake? Or the lemonade to wash the cake down? How does the cake you brought compare with the other cake on offer? Should you bring more next time? What will the other grown-ups do?
Much of the traffic at BETT or Special Needs North is exhibitors finding out what the others are offering. How much are they charging? Can they afford to keep going at the prices they are charging? Is there something nobody is doing very well which the customer clearly wants? You get the idea.
One big advantage we have in the UK is the Companies House web site. Here, for just £4, you can download the financial accounts of any UK Limited Company or PLC. The accounts are delivered by email. It is a great service and the Americans have no equivalent.
Two of the biggest companies have just reported.
Research Machines PLC had a hiccup and lost £8 million (in the previous year they made a profit of £5 million). But their growth of 27% in sales over the previous to £206 million gives a good background growth average for IT suppliers to education. The amount by which they grew, £42 million, is about the size of the whole UK educational software industry!
Granada Learning Ltd is the leading UK educational software provider although its sales are 3% of those of RM. Granada Learning Ltd (formerly YITM) is the outfit which bought SEMERC, Brilliant and ILP and has more recently acquired Black Cat software for £3.8 million and NFER-Nelson for £19.9 million.
Granada Learning sales grew by 20% over the previous year to almost £5.9 million. How much of this is SEMERC sales, or Brilliant sales, or Black Cat sales is not revealed. I would love to know!
In its first year to December 1995, YITM (as it then was) clocked up £6.1 million in sales and £1.1 million in profit.
The latest numbers are an improvement on last year but show 3% less sales than in 1995, 10% less profit, 75% decrease in sales overseas and 114% increase in staff from thirty-eight people then to ninety-two now. Not surprisingly, there is an accumulated loss over the five years of £10 million pounds. This could make much more sense than it seems. I think Granada Learning are planning something pretty exciting with the fusion of digital television of educational resources. They are superbly well placed to do this, and we won't see the fruits for a couple of years yet.
Among the Granada Learning companies is SEMERC, our main rival, which is probably now a little smaller than us (but there can't be much in it). They will know who is ahead when we publish our latest accounts in two month's time on 1st November!
Martin Littler
1st September 2001