The Challenge
By the end of 2025, Sona Business had built a working UK reseller network — four active partners delivering Sona's connectivity and mobile services to UK business customers. The commercial relationships existed. What didn't exist was a senior Sona presence in the UK.
The UK resellers needed:
- A single senior point of contact for commercial questions, escalations, and opportunity reviews
- Regular in-person engagement, not just remote calls with Rotterdam
- Someone with the seniority to unblock decisions and the UK market experience to help them grow
Sona had three realistic options. A permanent UK-based Sales Director — slow to recruit, expensive to sustain, high failure risk. A junior SDR — the wrong seniority for the relationships involved. Or fractional senior representation — the right model, if the right person could be found.
Sona engaged Grant & Graham to provide that fractional senior representation under G&G's Growth as a Service offering.
The Solution
Grant & Graham deployed Andrew Collins, as Sona Business's UK Sales Director — a fractional but fully-embedded senior role.
The engagement is structured around three commitments.
Senior representation, embedded. Andrew operates with a sonabusiness.com email address, is introduced to all UK resellers as Sona's Sales Director, and represents the business at partner calls, commercial reviews, and new-partner meetings. From the reseller's perspective there is a named senior UK contact; from Sona's perspective there is no permanent UK headcount.
Consistent operating rhythm. Two hours per reseller per week for commercial support — covering the pipeline, escalations, reporting, and opportunity development. Monthly progress reports back to Sonia and Walter in Rotterdam.
Quarterly in-person presence. Andrew meets each UK reseller face-to-face once per quarter. In the telecoms channel, that in-person cadence is what separates partners who actually sell from partners who merely sit in the contract database.
Grant & Graham also brings its own UK network into scope. Within the first two months of the engagement, Andrew had initiated new partner introductions — including a scheduled introduction call with Paul Withcombe of Can Do Communications — extending Sona's UK reach beyond the original four resellers.
"Sona didn't need a UK office. They needed a senior UK operator. That's the difference between scaling a channel and just hiring into one."— Andrew Collins, CEO & Founder, Grant & Graham
The Results
Two months into the engagement, the picture looks like this:
- UK channel live and supported — four resellers (including Brittalk Communications and Enter-AT) under consistent senior representation
- Zero permanent UK hires — no office, no payroll, no long-term commitment; Sona can scale the arrangement up or pause it based on commercial signal
- Reporting cadence established — weekly reseller updates, monthly reports to Rotterdam, quarterly in-person visits
- New partner pipeline opened — Grant & Graham network warm-introduced new UK partners Sona would not otherwise have reached
- Commercial governance in place — one senior UK voice managing escalations and commercial decisions, freeing Sonia and Walter to focus on the wider European business
The engagement is ongoing. The cost structure — fractional, variable, senior — would have been impossible to replicate with a permanent UK hire.
Why Growth as a Service — not a UK hire?
For a Dutch business with four UK resellers, the maths matters:
- Permanent UK Sales Director — recruitment 3–6 months, salary £100k+, pension, car, office, full commercial risk if the UK channel doesn't scale
- UK-based distributor or channel manager — typically junior, often conflicted (working for multiple vendors), no continuity
- Grant & Graham Growth as a Service — senior operator, weeks not quarters, scope sized to the revenue, scalable up or down
For some businesses, a permanent UK hire is the right answer. For Sona — a fast-moving European telecoms business with a finite UK channel — the fractional senior model was the right fit.
