The secret sauce for MCI’s journey from a company earning $20 million to $200 million in revenue was its ability to be nimble and move quickly, said CEO Anthony Marlowe.
For the uninitiated, MCI is a holding company consisting of business service brands like Gravis Apps, Gravis Marketing, OnBrand24, MCI BPO, MCI Federal Services, The Sydney Call Center, Valor Intelligent Processing and more. MCI, as a whole, offers customer experience management through business process outsourcing companies.
In other words, MCI businesses will handle chats, calls and emails whether the company manages its clients’ software and phone systems or not. Technology solutions they offer include API integration, intelligent virtual agents, contact center solutions, IT services, natural language processing, automated call flows, bot development and much more.
Its vast portfolio of services is run by more than 5,000 employees, with outsourcing service delivery facilities in the U.S., Canada, Central America, Mexico and Asia. After the pandemic, about 65% of MCI’s labor force works remotely, compared to 5% prior to March 2020.
“We move quickly and that provides advantages in both business and corporate development situations,” said Mr. Marlowe, noting the company seeks out acquisitions and focuses organic growth on where market demand lies. “In the last 10 years, MCI has grown roughly half organic, half inorganically.”
With the exception of 2020 due to COVID-19, MCI has completed around one to two acquisitions per year, and the company continues to seek out new acquisition opportunities. That can be difficult for MCI named on Inc. Magazine’s Fastest Growing Companies list 18 times in its history.
“Spreading ourselves across multiple counties and multiple time zones has been quite challenging,” he explained. “Europe and Africa are a quarter day ahead and the Philippines is a half day ahead.”
Most recently, MCI acquired OceanX LLC, a subsidiary of Guthy-Renker Ventures LLC, a contract center technology, services and brand reputation management firm based in Florida.
So where does MCI go from here? Mr. Marlowe believes this could be just the beginning.
“It is quite ambitious, but we would like to be a $1 billion company,” he said. “MCI projections for international growth are akin to our domestic growth from the last handful of years. As we grow internationally, our risk increases on various currencies and inflation, but being internationally and technologically diverse, provides us with an inherent hedge. One of the beauties of our company is that we service almost all industries, so when one segment is down, there is another that is up.”
Advancements in the artificial intelligence field have been sudden and immense in the last year, and he expects new progress will only help push the industry, and by extension MCI, forward.
“While AI/automation/bots will grow exponentially, our industry is projected to go from $250 billion a year to $500 billion a year,” he said. “Some say we are already a $1 trillion industry that is difficult to track.”
“MCI has been using automated technologies to provide better customer experiences for our clients, while being more efficient and doing more for less, for almost a decade,” he added. “How ChatGPT and customer experience (CX) evolve will be interesting to see just how automated complex claims, collections, customer service, retention and sales processes get. Certainly the percentage of live calls versus overall omni-channel interactions will continue to go down. The interesting part is that only about 25% of all companies have all of these types of processes outsourced.”
MCI details:
2022 Revenue: $194.27 M
Established: 2003
Top Executive: Anthony Marlowe, CEO
This article was originally published in the CBJ’s Largest Privately Held Companies magazine.
In 2023, this magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary, after a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic. It featured a look back through the last decade and a glimpse into the future of the Corridor’s biggest, and most impactful, companies. Through in-depth interviews and people-focussed articles, the magazine explored how these industry titans have supported and inspired their communities through hardship and prosperity, and how they plan to continue their involvement for years to come.
