In the global business communications arena, few stories illustrate the turbulence and tenacity of modern leadership like that of Steve Flavell and LoopUp. Over the past decade, a seismic migration has swept the sector, as enterprises have traded in legacy hardware for cloud-based platforms and new ways of working. The scale of the opportunity is immense: analysts now forecast the unified communications market will surge well past $200 billion by 2032. But for every opportunity, the threat of obsolescence looms close behind — a reality LoopUp would soon face head-on.
Before the storm, LoopUp rode a wave of early growth, securing its place as the first technology firm to IPO in post-Brexit London. The company’s strategy was a calculated contrarian bet: focus relentlessly on call reliability for professional services, rather than chasing the video-first trends of the time.
“We deliberately engineered our solution to separate audio from video, ensuring crystal-clear, dependable calls for our clients,” says Flavell, recalling the early premium meetings niche. That singular focus on quality paid off, as LoopUp posted 39% revenue growth post-IPO and attracted attention from industry analysts for its differentiated product. Yet as the pandemic redrew the competitive map, LoopUp’s strongest differentiator suddenly became its greatest vulnerability.
When remote work went mainstream, platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom rapidly became the industry default — and LoopUp’s core business collapsed almost overnight. “The toughest leadership challenge came out of the pandemic, when we realised that our legacy business was being subsumed,” Flavell explains. Revenue plummeted by 60% in 2021, as the market’s appetite shifted decisively toward integrated, all-in-one collaboration suites.
Faced with this existential threat, LoopUp’s leadership took a radical step: rather than fighting the giants, they chose to join them. The company pivoted away from its standalone conferencing product and retooled as a specialist in multinational cloud telephony, integrating directly with Microsoft Teams and tackling the core pain points of global enterprises — complexity, compliance, and operational risk. For LoopUp, survival demanded not just strategic change, but a complete transformation in business identity.
As the demands of the new business model outpaced the flexibility of public markets, Flavell and his team faced another daunting decision. With the cloud telephony business in high-growth but cash-intensive territory, the public markets proved ill-suited to the patient capital required for scale. In March 2024, LoopUp announced its intention to delist from the AIM market. The immediate reaction was severe — a two-thirds collapse in the company’s share price — but the board remained firm.
“Our decision to take the business private… has been the catalyst for this expedient and material £12 million equity raise,” Flavell notes, referring to the funding round completed just months later. Armed with new capital and freed from public scrutiny, LoopUp focused on consolidating its advantage where it mattered most: the complexities of multinational telephony.
Global enterprises, often overwhelmed by fragmented vendors and billing, have found a single-provider solution elusive — until now. LoopUp’s “ONE GLOBAL” proposition promises a unified contract, pricing, management portal, support team, and voice network, all fully integrated with Microsoft Teams and underpinned by extensive regulatory coverage.
This specialist focus is not easily replicated; becoming a licensed telecom provider in dozens of countries and building a private global network is a significant operational barrier. Customers have taken notice. “Having worldwide visibility and management of all our phone numbers for the first time was a liberating experience,” said Simon Vutich, Head of IS Operations, in a testimony on LoopUp’s website. For multinational clients, this approach means operational peace of mind, predictability, and a significant reduction in friction and cost.
But even as LoopUp solves the old problems of enterprise telephony, new competitive challenges are rapidly emerging. Today, the unified communications sector is entering a new phase, as artificial intelligence becomes the industry’s latest battlefield. Market leaders are racing to embed AI-driven features — from real-time transcription to automated analytics — and nearly half of enterprises already use AI meeting assistants, a figure expected to climb further.
Against this backdrop, there are questions to be asked about whether a pure specialist can thrive long-term in an ecosystem that is quickly becoming intelligent by default. The founder-led model that has driven LoopUp’s resilience — and Flavell’s own leadership through adversity — will now be tested in a market that prizes both operational excellence and rapid innovation. “You need a strategy, you need a vision, and you need your team to understand the ‘why’ of what they’re doing,” says Flavell.
As cloud communications becomes ever more intelligent, LoopUp’s next act will hinge on its ability to match operational excellence with innovation. For Steve Flavell, the ultimate test of leadership may be just beginning — but he has more than demonstrated that he is up for the challenge.
Read our full interview with Steve Flavell over on Business Quarter Executive.
