'We had to make it work': How 'No Plan B' ethos set Boxphish on path to success

In the space of four weeks, he’d left his job, found out he was going to be a dad, faced his wife Faye being made redundant and got to grips with living in lockdown.

Now the chief executive of Boxphish, Deacon Elliott tells me: “That was a blessing actually because you thought that you had the money and the experience behind you, and all of a sudden there’s a missile that almost annihilates it. I had no Plan B, so we had to make this work. Removing options is a really powerful way of making you focus.”

Deacon Elliott’s best friend Henry Doyle had just sold IT security and storage service Altinet and had an idea for a new business – and a proposal for his pal.

Then at The Technology Group, Deacon Elliott says: “I was earning good money at the time and had a few per cent in the other business. We were doing well, so I declined.”

But on the drive home from meeting up with Doyle, he said to himself: “I thought, what’s the worst that can happen? I’m very lucky. I have an incredibly supportive wife and she kind of knows that I have some crazy ideas and she trusts that in the grand scheme of things, we will be fine.”

The proposal was Boxphish, with a concept similar to the HubSpot marketing hub, where you design all your mailers, load your data in and don’t have to worry about it. The idea was that security web training ran itself and for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), anything you take off the to-do list of time-poor technology managers is valuable.

Once he’d agreed to quit his job and be backed by Doyle and his Altinet co-founder Dan Bailey, he got to work finding customers.

“It took about six weeks for the first one to come through,” says Deacon Elliott. “We celebrated with a Domino’s pizza because it was Covid and that was all you could do. Then there were no sales for a good couple of weeks but suddenly four came in a day.”

As it stands today, the business is growing fast – Boxphish has investment from growth fund BGF, new offices in the increasingly hip Leeds South Bank area and is recruiting the kind of talent to enable it to be much bigger.

While competitors tended to look at big ticket corporate customers, the Boxphish early point of difference was its focus on schools and charities. These were getting hammered by cyber attacks during the pandemic and, today, 1,000-plus schools are customers.

Deacon Elliott remembers: “Initially we undercut competitors, we were far cheaper. Our service was always phenomenal. I appreciate the economics don’t work, but from day one I wanted to ensure that customers are at the heart of everything we do, even if that meant going on site to support them.”

Cash-strapped schools adopted a pack mentality – if one subscribed to a product, others felt reassured – plus the consolidation of schools into multi-academy trusts meant multiple customers might follow.

Deacon Elliott says that Boxphish “kind of fell into the private sector”. He’d got a few customers, started doing mailers, made some cold calls and went to his black book – “people I had worked with for 15 years”. Then the team decided to make a little acquisition.

“Someone messaged me to say there is a well-known entrepreneur who has done a massive exit and has set a business up called Purplephish. He is happy to give it a good home. I said, ‘OK, but we don’t have any money.’ We thought that the combination of the two businesses could be very good. We were a similar size, with a similar number of customers. Our customers were similar, with local government and education.”

Deacon Elliott became confident that Boxphish was viable. It took on some debt from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund with a view to creating customer success and sales roles. It quickly grew revenue and was profitable, unusual for a Software As A Service (SAAS) business at that scale.

Thinking the company was probably too small for private equity (PE) interest, he was delighted when BGF thought differently based on the cyber sector, SAAS and growth rate, and they joined forces in April 2024.

Deacon Elliott used the cash to invest in people, increasing the sales team from two to eight. At the same time, Claire Elcock, who had PE experience, was brought in as chief finance and operations officer to help make the business super efficient, Alex Thomas – sales manager at Purplephish – became chief revenue officer and Neil Davies came in from Sky Bet as vice president of product.

The next milestone is to reach one million users, which is close. The product travels well too, so Europe is on the cards.

Before Boxphish, Deacon Elliott ran the northern enterprise sales for IT consultancy Sabio, learning from co-founder Kenneth Hitchen.

Raised in Harrogate, the youngest of four, a different path had been planned for Deacon Elliott, his father, grandfather and uncle all having been RAF pilots and navigators.

Deacon Elliott says: “The natural thing was to be a pilot, but I don’t particularly like flying and I was never going to be in the services. I was quite cheeky and the formality of it doesn’t work for my personality.”

He got his first proper job in 2011, working in IT sales for Intechnology, owned by famous Yorkshire tech entrepreneur Peter Wilkinson.

Deacon Elliott says that the marketplace where Boxphish finds itself now is much more competitive than it was then.

“We aren’t in the frontline of AI, innovation or redesigning algorithms. But we don’t need to be. Everything we do is around the experience people have when they engage Boxphish. But from the moment that someone requests interest in Boxphish to being a customer, if we haven’t made them feel really special about that experience, we have let ourselves and them down.”