PICTURES BY GRAEME ROWATT
SCALING
THE HEIGHTS
Ian Brown, managing director of Excelpoint, talks to Peter
Barron about plotting his route to business success – and his
ambitions for the software solutions company to go even higher
As a teenage boy growing up in County
Durham, Ian Brown developed a
passion for the great outdoors and
climbing Britain’s highest peaks.
“I loved nothing more than camping,
plotting adventures, and working out the
best routes to get to the top of mountains,” he
recalls.
Now, as a successful entrepreneur, Ian sees
climbing mountains as the perfect metaphor
for running his software innovations business,
Excelpoint, based on Aycliffe Business Park.
A mountainscape even forms the backdrop
on the home page of the company website,
with a quote from Martin Luther King: “You
don’t have to see the whole mountain, just take
the first step.”
As MD, Ian sees it as his job to help
Excelpoint’s customers to meet their
challenges. “We come up with solutions to
help them to get where they want to go – and
that’s what I’ve always enjoyed doing,” says Ian.
At the start of what has turned out to be an
unforgettable year, the fast-growing software
solution provider moved its head office to a
new custom-designed office within The Work
Place, only for the Covid-19 crisis to force the
20-strong team to work from home.
But Ian takes justifiable pride in having seen
his workforce rise to the challenge, and go
on doing what they do best – enabling large
and small customers to adapt to the global
pandemic.
“We are a software company, but it is our
people who make the difference,” he says. “We
have built a first-class team, and they use the
technology to find the solutions our customers
need. Our raw material is brain power.”
And yet, Ian is the first to admit that he
wasn’t a high-flyer at school. “I did reasonably
well, and didn’t have to work hard, but I
was more attracted to being outdoors and
exploring,” he recalls.
Ian was born and raised in Bishop
Auckland. His father was a HGV driver with
the unlikely name of Cresswell – “I think
he was named after a footballer” – and his
mother, Mona, worked in shops in the town