Huge congratulations to our CEO & MD Chris Morrissey for being recognised as one of the Business News Australia Pty Ltd Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs!
Chris was unable to attend the awards ceremony on Friday night but is celebrating with the team in Swansea!
“A cyber security-first approach to IT managed services put Chris Morrissey’s Ever Nimble ahead of the curve when it started in West Perth in 2018, and despite a prioritisation of technical expertise over business development the company has grown rapidly since then with offices in four locations.
Having worked in an operations management role for a large UK retailer, Morrissey’s career was reset in 2011 when he had the opportunity to move to Australia, where he started out as an IT support engineer at retailer Dusk (ASX: DSK).
It wasn’t long before he got a job at an IT managed services provider (MSP) where he cut his teeth in the trade, springboarding him into a role as technology manager at mining consultancy CSA Global. He previously had designs to become a founder someday, but it was there at CSA where a culture of entrepreneurialism gave him the confidence he needed to take the plunge.
“That was always the plan – I had a lot of management experience, was able to build teams, but I lacked the technology experience, so I understood that I needed to work from the ground up and work in a couple of different fields in the industry to be good at it,” he says.
“In 2018 the world was starting to wake up when it came to cyber, and we were excellent in that area and still are; it’s what we’re known for, it’s what our customers come for.
“On launching, even though we were quite small, we were using technology that some of our competitors hadn’t even heard of. Now four years later everyone’s caught up a bit – especially after the [data breach] news with Optus – but that’s been our focus.”
Customers do however get the whole MSP package; the differentiator for Ever Nimble is that the client or user conversation begins with cyber security. In 2019 the decision was made to set up a Melbourne office, primarily so that early-rising WA-based mining clients could get service earlier, but that also led to Victorian client acquisition.
Later that year, pre-COVID, the group kept on its track for round-the-clock service by opening up a UK office, which in the MSP industry is helpful for doing maintenance or updates while Australian customers are asleep, but also made it easier to work with customers’ operations in Africa where timezones overlap quite well.
It was with the UK launch that life went full circle for the entrepreneur.
“It’s a personal story for me because I actually really struggled to get a job in IT in the region where I grew up, which is a very poor area of Wales,” he says.
“When I looked to open an office in the UK, we obviously looked at London, we looked at Manchester and the big areas, but we actually ended up opening in my hometown of Swansea. I’m particularly proud of that.”
Since then Ever Nimble has opened up a Brisbane office, launched a marketing agency called Electric Peach and technology vendor Tech Lane, and he is also proud to say that 40 per cent of Ever Nimble’s technicians are female – something that is “unheard of in the industry”.”
Read Chris’ profile on Business News Australia here.