From Council Estate to £10M AV Company: The SPOR Group Story
- Chris Gore
- Jul 2
- 6 min read
From council estate to a £10M global AV company, Chris Gore tells the full SPOR Group founding story on the Dodgewood Podcast.
Chris Gore | Updated 2026
As heard on the Dodgewood Podcast
This blog is based on a conversation between Chris Gore, CEO of SPOR Group, and the host of the Dodgewood Podcast. It covers the founding story of SPOR Group, the first deal, the growth from two people to a global AV company and what comes next.
The version of this story that gets told at industry events is the one that starts at the first £800,000 deal. This is the version that starts earlier, in Liverpool, where there was no father figure, no mentor, no business background and no idea how to spell the word entrepreneurship.
Chris Gore, CEO and co-founder of SPOR Group, sat down with the Dodgewood Podcast to tell the full story, from the council estate to the military, from the MBA to the account manager role that showed him the gap in the market, from the kitchen table startup to a company managing over 1,500 meeting room sites across the UK, Europe, Singapore, Sydney and Hong Kong.
The Origin: Military, MBA and a Gap in the Market
At twenty-four, sitting in the military, the realisation hit that the entrepreneur thing was the direction. The problem was not knowing what entrepreneurship actually was or how to do it. The solution was getting the military to fund an MBA through their education credit scheme, a decision that took about ten seconds once it was clear that a budget-holder understanding how to spend and manage money was exactly the kind of argument a commanding officer would approve.
The MBA was finished at thirty. Theory. No practical experience. Thirty years old, still teaching people how to do press ups with an MBA and no business to show for it. That was the reason for leaving. The pension would have been comfortable. That was also the trap. So the notice went in, a CV was written with MBA at the top, and London followed.
Three years at AVISPL, the largest AV company in the world doing around a billion dollars a year. Account manager. Four and five million pound projects. Good commission. And a recurring conversation with clients who had a quarter of a million pounds and needed ten meeting rooms done and could not get the attention of a company focused on Tottenham's football stadium.
That conversation happened approximately ten times in twelve months. Two and a half million pounds sitting on the table that the biggest AV company in the world was not interested in. Chris Spence, then the biggest UK sales guy at the same company doing thirteen to fourteen million a year, had the same itch. Beers were had. Six months later, SPOR Group was formed.
The First Deal: House on the Line, £800k in Week Six
The plan going in was straightforward. Target £250,000 projects because that was the size they could handle with the capital available. Chris put in £50,000. Spence put in £50,000. That made £100,000 in the business. Spence also put his house up as a personal guarantee to open trade accounts with suppliers who knew them from AVISPL but had no trading history to rely on.
Maxine, Chris's partner at the time, agreed to cover the mortgage for two years. That was the security net. Two years. Make it work. That conversation mattered as much as anything else that followed.
Six weeks in, the first job landed. Not the £250,000 target. £800,000. The kit to fulfil it cost approximately £630,000. That required a conversation with the supplier procurement contact who knew the team from the previous company. She extended the payment terms. The client was on forty-five days. That gap was enough. Invoice issued. Payment received. Supplier paid. SPOR Group was running.
Then the builder who had contracted them on that job liked the work and gave them a second project for £260,000. And it went from there.
COVID, the NHS and the Moment That Changed the Trajectory
SPOR Group started in early 2020. Six months later, COVID happened. What followed was not luck in any pure sense, but the combination of being in the right market, having no existing client base to protect and having the operational capacity to move when everything else was slowing down.
The NHS came to them. Seven hospital trusts needed to digitise their meeting room infrastructure. Everything had been done in person. Now it needed to be done by video. SPOR did all seven trusts in 2020. And then the market that had been sitting at £250,000 project size opened up considerably as every organisation in the country was trying to solve the same problem at the same time.
SPORTrack: The Thing That Changed the Business Model
A client with sixteen sites across the UK and Europe had a boardroom camera go down in Paris. Nobody knew until twelve people sat around the table pressed the button to start the meeting and the camera did not work. CEO in the room. Clients dialled in remotely. Engineer flown from the UK. Camera turned out to be out of warranty. Three weeks of the room being offline. A quote for a replacement camera on top of the travel and labour. The client's message was direct: you've grown us. We like you. Fix that bit.
The response was SPORTrack, the remote monitoring platform that now sits across every device SPOR deploys globally. Every device, every IP address, watched in real time. A camera goes offline at 2am on a Thursday in Singapore. The help desk gets a ping. Proactive intervention before Monday morning. The client's quarterly business review shows them problems they never even knew had been caught. That is the difference between a company that installs things and a company that manages them.
That shift from project company to managed service company was the single biggest strategic move SPOR made. Not because it was planned that way from the start. Because a client in Paris made the problem visible.
Thirty-Five Staff, a First Hire Who Is Now FD, and Managing People
The first hire was Steph, a procurement coordinator from the previous company who had been refused remote working, moved to Southport with her husband and ended up working in a care home. A phone call. A train to Southport. A conversation about SPOR and whether she wanted back in the procurement game. She was on the train the same day. She is now the FD and head of operations.
Thirty-five full-time staff in the UK now, with staff in India and Europe as well. That growth brought a genuine question about management style. Thirteen years in the military produces a direct approach that does not always translate cleanly into civilian management. The honest answer given on the podcast: it is still something being figured out. The practical response is putting the right people in management positions and letting them handle what they are equipped to handle.
On difficult conversations, the book recommended is Radical Candour. The principle is that the conversation, whether positive or negative, always needs to happen. The worst outcome is letting problems run without addressing them because everyone else in a small company sees it and wonders why nothing is being done.
What Comes Next: Acquisition, Then Exit
The business is in late-stage conversations to acquire a company with 1.6 million in revenue and twelve staff. That will be the first acquisition. The plan beyond that is to build toward fifteen million in AV revenue through acquisition of complementary businesses: strategic workplace consultants, design and build firms, others in the ecosystem around meeting room technology.
At fifteen million, with complementary acquisitions alongside that, the group becomes interesting to the kinds of buyers who have been circling already. Private equity conversations have happened. The conclusion from those was that the reporting structure would not be workable. The end goal is a proper exit, on terms that work, with the management team structured appropriately to make that possible.
The EMI scheme for the management team was set up six weeks before this conversation. Shares given to the people who have helped build the business. Aligned on what the exit looks like. The timeline is probably five years, but the honest answer is that if someone came in with the right number today, the conversation would happen. For more on what SPOR Group actually does and how to work with them, read what is an AV integrator.
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