Maxim FM and NEL an excellent NE team

Maxim Facilities Management has been working with the North East’s most active business investor, NEL Fund Managers, since 2013 as a key strand of its continuing growth strategy.

NEL provides tailored funding solutions to ambitious small and medium-sized businesses right across North East England, and since being set up in 1989, it has managed 13 investment funds with a combined value of over £90m.

It has made three separate investments in Maxim FM’s growth strategy, with a total value of £790,000 being injected into the Sunderland-headquartered firm to help accelerate its growth plans – and the results are plain to see in Maxim’s impressive progress.

When its relationship with NEL began, Maxim was a £4m turnover company employing around 400 staff – and now, it has a turnover of more than £10m and over 1,100 staff across the UK, with ambitions to further increase over the next few years.

NEL’s initial £400,000 investment from the Finance for Business North East Growth Fund enabled Maxim to continue to expand and develop the services it offers, while the £250,000 investment that followed in 2014 allowed it to invest in new systems which streamlined the ways in which contracts were managed and enhanced the site and management information available to clients.

A further £140,000 of investment were made in 2015-16, which enabled Maxim to extend its technology investments, take on more and bigger contracts and make a number of key appointments to its management team who have since driven its growth and operational strategies.

Jonathan Luke, portfolio director at NEL Fund Managers, says: “When we were first introduced, we saw that Maxim FM had grown swiftly in a very short space of time, and had clear potential to achieve a great deal more.

“Their business plans have always provided strong investment opportunity for us, and their execution and progress has been extremely impressive.

“They’ve also provided an excellent example of how North East companies can use different tranches of investment capital to help them meet their commercial objectives at different stages of their development.”

Graham Conway, founder and managing director at Maxim FM, adds: “The investments we’ve secured through NEL have been key to taking the business forward, implementing new services and technologies, building revenues and creating hundreds of new jobs.

“Our intention was always to grow a national contract cleaning business offering wider facilities management services, and NEL’s involvement has allowed up to achieve this ambition.

“This gave us the confidence and credibility required to both compete against some of the industry’s biggest names and win higher end contracts with well-known firms across the UK.

“Our relationship with the NEL team has remained very positive over the years, with the input they’ve had into the business proving extremely useful, and it was always a natural step to extend our partnership when we went to look for further investment.