Business angels wanted too much equity. VCs weren’t interested. Undeterred, Chris Rayner, founder of plastic card printing business Eagle Technologies, last month secured the investment he needed. In the first of a series profiling the company’s growth, Growth Business finds out how he did it.

Founded in November 1999 by the energetic Chris Rayner, Eagle Technologies has rapidly established itself as a leading player in the plastic card printing market and the largest business of its kind in the UK. Essentially a distributor, the company supplies customers (from leisure centres to loyalty card scheme operators) with a variety of printers produced by the industry’s leading manufacturers.

As full colour offerings retail for between £999 and £3,000 apiece, the market potential is, according to Rayner, lucrative – just one reason why the company is already profitable.

A growth market
Recent reports have suggested that more than 90 per cent of the UK population now carry at least one printed plastic card. Furthermore, research organisation Datamonitor indicates that this figure is steadily rising as individuals add still more store loyalty cards to their university, school or workplace security passes, gym membership IDs and credit/debit cards.

Operating technical support and consultancy divisions alongside its core distribution business, Rayner sees Eagle’s market as growing by around 30 per cent each year. It is from this base that he hopes to almost double turnover from £2.2 million to £4 million in the next 12 months.

Needless to say, such ambitious growth targets are not reached easily and Eagle recently found itself in need of cash to help bolster its team and develop new projects. For Rayner, however, the process of first identifying the right funding option and subsequently raising the cash proved to be complex and convoluted.

A turn-off for VCs
‘We contemplated business angel funding,’ Rayner reminisces, ‘and we could have taken that route, but we would have had to lose equity and though that’s not scary in itself, you have to ask what you’re getting in return.’

For that reason Eagle’s attentions switched instead to venture capitalists (VCs), with the hope that these larger organisations would be able to offer more in terms of advice and ongoing support.

Keen to gain exposure to as many potential investors as possible, Rayner chose to attend a venture capital conference in London but was disappointed by the message he received.

‘We spoke to a lot of people,’ he recalls, ‘and [the impression we were given was] that if you’re looking for seed funding then great. If your revenues are high and you’re about to launch something new, then fine. But if you don’t fit into either of these camps then you’re not going to be an attractive investment for most VCs.’

In spite of this setback, the event was not a total write-off for Eagle. It was at the conference that Rayner first discovered the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme (SFLGS). This is a programme through which expanding early-stage businesses that have previously been turned down for loans can secure finance, with the aid of a Government guarantee.