Simon Chappell is co-founder and CEO of Assured Data Protection, the Leeds-based managed service provider for backup, disaster recovery and cyber resilience that he set up in 2016, three years after selling his previous business, Backup Technology, to iomart for £23m.
In June 2026, as the company marked its 10th year, Assured was named Rubrik’s Global MSP Partner of the Year and opened a new UK and EMEA headquarters at Thorpe Park in Leeds, with more than 300 staff worldwide and a US base in Herndon, Virginia.
Oakley Capital agreed to invest in the business in October 2024 to support its next stage of growth, particularly in the US. He tells Business Matters why focus, partnerships and culture matter more, not less, as a company scales.
What do you currently do at Assured Data Protection?
As CEO, my main responsibility is setting the direction for the business: where we want to go, what we want to achieve and making sure we have the right people around us to get there.
A big part of my role is building and supporting the leadership team. As a business grows, you have to become comfortable surrounding yourself with people who are better than you at what they do and giving them the freedom to succeed.
I also spend a lot of time on the bigger strategic decisions for the company, including our relationship with our investor, Oakley Capital, and thinking about the next phase of growth.
But culture is equally important to me. We have built Assured over the past 10 years, and I want to make sure that as we grow, we retain the values and environment that made the business successful in the first place.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
Assured was not my first business. Earlier in my career, I co-founded Backup Technology (BTL), which we eventually sold to iomart in 2013 for £23m. That experience gave me a very good understanding of the data protection market, but it also taught me a huge amount about building and scaling a business.
When we founded Assured 10 years ago, it was a group of five friends with deep experience in the industry, a shared vision and a clear view of where the market was heading. We saw an opportunity to build a specialist business focused entirely on helping organisations protect their data, recover from disruption and become more resilient.
The fundamentals of that idea have not changed, but the environment certainly has. Ten years ago, disaster recovery was often associated with hardware failures, outages or natural disasters. Today, ransomware and cyber-attacks are among the biggest concerns for businesses, and we are now looking ahead to risks associated with AI and autonomous agents operating across corporate systems.
The technology changes, but the fundamental question for businesses remains the same: if something goes wrong, can you recover your data?
Who do you admire?
Henry Fraser is someone I have enormous admiration for. He was paralysed from the shoulders down following an accident when he was 17 and has since become an artist, author and motivational speaker.
What I admire most is his attitude. He talks about focusing on what you can do rather than what you cannot, and finding opportunity and purpose when circumstances change dramatically. That sense of perspective and resilience is incredibly powerful.
Business inevitably has difficult moments, but stories like Henry’s are a reminder that your response to setbacks is often far more important than the setback itself.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Plenty. I think if you have been building businesses for long enough and claim you would not change anything, you probably have not been paying enough attention.
One of the biggest lessons came from trying to expand into the US with my previous business. We did not have the right team on the ground, and ultimately we did not make it work in the way we had hoped. When we started Assured, I was determined not to repeat that mistake. We built the company to be global from day one, with operations in both the UK and US and strong leadership on the ground.
In between selling BTL and starting Assured, I invested personal capital in a cycling team. I love cycling, but I discovered that having a passion for something does not necessarily translate into a solid business idea. Professional team cycling is an incredibly difficult sport to make commercially sustainable. I do not regret doing it, but it reinforced the importance of separating something you love from something that makes sense as a business.
There is no doubt that I have made mistakes along the way, but that is part of entrepreneurship. The important thing is to recognise them, learn quickly and make sure you do not keep making the same ones.
What defines your way of doing business?
Relationships, focus and people.
We have always had a channel-first strategy at Assured because strong partnerships allow everyone involved to play to their strengths. The best business relationships are not purely transactional; they are built over time through trust and consistently doing what you say you are going to do.
We are also very focused on being the best at what we do. We have deliberately remained specialists in data protection, disaster recovery and cyber resilience. That inch-wide, mile-deep approach has become one of our clearest differentiators. There is always a temptation when a business grows to move into adjacent markets, but sometimes saying no is just as important as saying yes.
Finally, I want people to enjoy working here. You can set ambitious targets and expect high standards while still creating a positive environment where people are trusted, supported and enjoy coming to work. For me, those things are not contradictory; they are closely connected.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Be careful whose advice you listen to. Everyone has a different attitude to risk, and advice that makes perfect sense for one person can be completely wrong for an entrepreneur.
Building a business requires you to be comfortable with a degree of uncertainty. You need optimism and self-belief, particularly when other people are telling you all the reasons something will not work. That does not mean ignoring good advice or taking unnecessary risks, but you have to understand your own appetite for risk rather than adopting somebody else’s.
I would also say stay focused as you grow. Success creates opportunities, and the temptation is to pursue all of them. One of the hardest things for a rapidly scaling business is maintaining the discipline to understand what you are exceptionally good at and keep investing in it.
Growth is important, but growth without focus can very quickly take you away from the thing that made the business successful in the first place.
