On March 31^st the Software, Risk & Compliance Group (SRC) retired its legacy brands – William Martin, Meridian, Prosure360 and Elogs – and launched Vantify, a new business with combined revenues of £20m and 300 employees.

It’s March 31^st, and Vantify has become a reality. How do you feel? Very excited for our next chapter and a little nostalgic. I’m genuinely so proud of my fantastic team, all their hard work to get us to this point. Not just in the last few months as we built Vantify, but the last few years. We’ve seen so much transformation to get us to this point. All our employees and teams are super capable and have played their part in this success. We should feel very proud of what we have created together.

William Martin and Elogs have been recognised in the industry for many years, haven’t they? They have. So, we didn’t take the decision to retire those brands lightly. But I have no doubt that evolving to Vantify is the right move for our clients and people. This has been a project with real purpose behind it, which makes it authentic. I was so pleased by the reception of our team when we announced the plan internally, back in November 2024, and also the overwhelmingly positive feedback from early engagement with our key clients.

You were nervous about how the move to a single brand, and a single entity, would be received by your team? Yes, for sure – it can be very emotive. Some of the team had been with the legacy businesses since day one – it becomes your identity and your culture. But we really thought it through and openly shared our rationale, which they totally understood. While we had brought our brands under the SRC umbrella in 2022, and started working more cohesively in some areas, they had still been operating largely as independent business units.

So how did you win your team over? Our pitch was that we believed we could be a better, bolder business by coming together and as a result be far more efficient and invest fully into our ecosystem – under a single identity with aligned values and principles. Ultimately the time felt right and we wanted to give our clients what they wanted. You hear companies talk about “disrupting the market” which I tend to find a bit trite. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we did have a genuine opportunity to do something special. Those moments are rare, and we had to take the leap. In many ways, this has been years in the making.

Tell me about the name – how did you come up with it? We didn’t use an agency for the name, it was inspired by our team. We all loved the idea of giving clients a single vantage point over their risk management, simplifying things, and unifying our compliance products.

That was the origin of the name? Yes. We secured vantify.com and registered the name as a trademark – both of which have set us up for the future. It’s funny to look back at some of our earliest conversations on the name. I’m so sure we made the right choice and so glad it was homegrown. It’s simple, and one of our core objectives is to keep things simple. We also liked the energy in the name and our team now refer to themselves as Vantifiers. I like that. There’s a real feeling created with our new name that truly resonates with us being stronger together and advancing every day.

Take us back a bit. How does Vantify align with your own career journey? I have Spanish parents who emigrated to the UK, so my first exposure to health & safety was when I was 13 years old. My parents didn’t speak English as a first language, so I’d help them fill out health & safety documentation and risk assessments, supporting with the visits from the local EHS authority. I suppose I caught the bug back then and that early experience showed me how complex risk management can be, especially back then when it was all managed in lever arch folders and carbon copy reports! That always stayed with me, and I think it’s a big part of why I felt so passionate about making compliance easier, not harder. Vantify is the answer to a problem I feel the industry has faced for years. Now, we’re bringing that solution to everyone.

How long did you work in the hospitality industry? Until I left home to attend University. Although even then, we were roped in at weekends until my parents retired. I got a degree from Leeds and secured an interim H&S role at Nestlé Rowntree.

Was that an internal health & safety role? Yes, it was a university placement and gave me a great experience into food manufacturing. But I did eat far too many Jelly Eggs. I still remember the smell of chocolate now…. and after that I secured a permanent role at SM&MS (Safety Management & Monitoring Services), a family run business in West Yorkshire. It was a modest organisation at the time, and we were the underdogs. It was hard work but a great learning journey. SM&MS was eventually acquired by Alcumus, where I remained a Director and oversaw all business operations for a further three years.

And from there, onto William Martin? That’s right, I became Managing Director of William Martin, and we used that platform to acquire complementary businesses. Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) seemed like a perfect next step for our client base – so we bought Elogs. After that we acquired Barbour EHS, our regulatory intelligence service – which was another tool I had used for many years as a single source of truth for legal updates. Then we built Prosure360 to compete with traditional SSIP supply chain vetting schemes. Now we’ve taken the final step to merge everything fully into Vantify – one team, one ecosystem – with clever technology and highly qualified consultants at the heart of everything.

So, what should clients expect? Simply a better client experience, and flexibility to expand within our ecosystem. Our leadership team and senior roles remain, albeit in roles which are now aligned to a single business. Everyone is playing to their strengths, and we will continue to make enhancements across every area of the business – from the initial sales process to service delivery and support functions.

And what about the wider team: what’s next for the Vantifiers? We have three new values to accompany the launch of Vantify: Stronger Together, Client Proud, and Advancing Every Day. So now it’s just about living those values, and striving to cause some much needed market disruption with this new approach. We now have the investment, structure, technology, and people to push the boundaries of what’s possible in compliance and risk management.

And what next for you?

A short break to recharge, then straight back in. We’re just getting started.