HaloPSA Founder: With $1B Revenue Goal, ‘We Want To Be The World's Favorite B2B SaaS Platform’
‘You have my word that we will not be squeezing partner margin at any point in time. That's what tends to happen with mostly other vendors. That is never going to happen at Halo,’ says Paul Hamilton, HaloPSA’s founder.
The Stowmarket, U.K.-based PSA vendor held its inaugural Orbit conference this week in Woking, U.K. at the McLaren Technology Centre. At the show, the firm announced a partnership with NinjaOne to bring an all-in-one, “top tier” solution to MSPs; Halo Gravity, a business improvement service slated for mid-2025; and new AI-driven features aimed at augmenting the roles of level-one support technicians and streamlining processes within account management and sales.
“We want to be the world's favorite B2B SaaS platform,” he said. “There's not a lot of love out there for enterprise-grade software. In my opinion, I think there's a reputation of them costing a lot of money and not getting a lot of service. Halo is going to be the first enterprise vendor that is loved by the industry.”
The vendor has been on an upwards trajectory in recent years. The company has doubled its revenue eight years in a row and now has $100 million in revenue. It’s also expanded and recently opened up offices in Dubai and Florida.
“We’re not really money-driven people,” said Hamilton. “We'll do anything we can to gain any kind of edge and efficiency in the business anywhere.”
And he is adamant that the company will remain privately owned.
“I can assure you, for as long as I'm at the helm, there is absolutely no way we're going to take on any external investment,” he said. “It's just not needed to for us to achieve our ambitions.”
Halo execs took to the stage this week to discuss their next stage of growth, remaining true to their culture and giving back to MSPs.
Here are the six key takeaways from executives at HaloPSA’s Orbit show.
On The Path To $1 Billion In Revenue
“It’s 59 percent growth every year for the next five years,” Hamilton said. “We want to stay a very lean team that's very laser focused on what we do, which means that the only way we can actually achieve our goal to a billion dollars is to have a very, very partner-led strategy. That's very core to our philosophy. You have my word that we will not be squeezing partner margin at any point in time. That's what tends to happen with mostly other vendors. That is never going to happen at Halo.”
On Making ‘The Best Tools Possible’
“Halo is obsessed with making the best tools possible,” said HaloPSA executive Tim Barton-Wines. “It's not just how good your toolset is, but it's the interoperability for how they interact with your wider tech landscape. “There are lots of products out there, but the ones that rise up and have a legacy are the ones that end up serving that purpose better than anything else. That's because the people who did this really thought about what they were creating and why. It's because the creators of the world's best products remain true to that central mission, that authentic purpose, that they're after. It’s a core mission to create something and design it to be the best, and that is what you are getting with Halo. We’re a privately-owned, founder-led team where most of the company is made up of software engineers. The entire leadership is technical, and they are just building the dream product that they want to use themselves.”
On Customers Marketing The Product
“We don't have much of a marketing budget, and the way that's worked is we've really worked on product market fit,” HaloPSA CEO Tim Bowers said. “When you achieve that, your customers become your marketing engine. If you haven't used Halo and are maybe considering it, if you find anyone today who's a current customer, they're our marketing engine.”
“In the MSP space we are very much blessed because it enabled us to not have to put money into marketing early on and allow good work to spread based on the merit of the product,” Barton-Wines said.
On MSPs Selling 'The Whole Halo Suite'
“What we have planned for 2025 is we're really going to start pushing a new program to enable your teams to be able to sell the whole Halo suite,” Bowers said. “So Halo CRM, Halo Service Desk and Halo ITSM to your existing customer base. Deloitte, Accenture, all the big consultant companies are making huge amounts of money on it, and we don't see any reason why MSPs can't do the same thing. You've got the skill set, you know how Halo works, so that's something that's we're going to be pushing in 2025.”
On Staying Ahead Of Competition
“It’s more of the same,” Bowers said. “It's maintaining our company's culture and sticking to our core principles of being obsessed with making the best products. What's allowed us to do that is being privately owned. We don't have any timeframes and there's no quarterly review where we have to discuss how much profit we made. It's all long-term decision making that’s allowed us to get there. Everyone kind of sees Halo and probably thinks it's a rocket ship that's come out of nowhere, but it's not. We've been working on this, me for 13 years, Paul (Hamilton) for way longer. You're seeing the combination of all of that time and energy and resource spent perfecting a product. It's only really caught up with ConnectWise, (Datto) AutoTask and these other tools in the last couple of years. We’ve spent 20 years playing catch up and only really this year got to the point where we are now able to spend time innovating and doing things that we really want to do.”
On Giving More Back To The Customer
“We’re still just as cost efficient as we always have been,” said Hamilton. “That avoids us from having to get external investment to scale and grow, so we can just do that organically. When you look years down the line, every little bit has a massive impact. We're doing pioneering stuff all the time. We're trying to come up with things whenever we can find a way to give more value back to the customer. That's what we love. It's almost the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Everyone else is like, ‘How can we extract more money from our customers?’ We're like, ‘OK, they give us X. How can we give them more product for X?’