Meet Mark Reynolds, Founder of Hable

Tell us about the business – how did it start?

Throughout my career I had always known that at some point, I wanted to start my own business. During my four years working at Microsoft I learnt about their partner model, and spotted an opportunity to build a new type of Microsoft Partner.

Most partners are focused on the technology side of a project – selling licenses, selling devices, migrating data-centres – but what I noticed is that none of them were really focused on the people.

That was the a gap in the market that I identified, helping large organisations make the most of the Microsoft cloud, but with a more people centric approach.

I wrote two words down on a piece of paper: dream, deploy. And that’s how Hable was born, at the start of 2015.

How are you different?

Hable cuts across 3 different company types: we’re part consulting practice,part training provider, part technical partner.

At our core, we’re an Adoption and Change Management partner, but we also run training sessions on things like Microsoft Teams, carry out technical work such as SharePoint migration,and even have an inhouse comms and design team who act as a Marketing agency for our customers.

We’re also really proud of our accessibility credentials – accessibility is baked into every single thing that we do, meaning that customers can’t buy a Hable service that isn’t accessible.

What really sets us apart though is that everything we do puts the people at the heart. This isn’t something we’ve seen widely anywhere else.

What challenges have you overcome? What have you learnt?

As with a lot of other businesses around the world, COVID impacted Hable hugely.

We had to change our whole model when the first lockdown hit back in March 2020. We went from a 96% onsite, face to face delivery model to a 95% remote, online model – which we had to move to deliver via Microsoft Teams.

We flipped our model under very difficult circumstances, but, this ended up being a very successful move for us.

Like many other technology companies who have flourished due to COVID causing a higher reliance on tech, wehave grown significantly during the last 18 months. We’ve brought in a whole handful of new people to the team, taken on some of our biggest ever projects, and even expanded into the Middle East.

What are your plans for growth?

We’re currently in a really exciting time at Hable, and are in the process of hiring more people into our UK HQ as we continue to grow at pace. At the moment we’re adding one or two people pretty much every month as we keep up with the latest demands from customer projects.

But the most exciting thing we’re doing right now is exporting Hable to the Middle East. We opened an office in Dubai 6 earlier this year and have exciting plans for that region as we learn how to take our business international.

Once we’ve learnt how our model works in the Middle East, we have plans to look at other markets too.

Most importantly, as we grow we want to maintain the culture we’ve cultivated here at Hable. We think we’ve built something special, where everyone is included, employee wellbeing is prioritised, and every person at #TeamHable can thrive.