The Story of Provizio: How an Accountant’s Frustration With Spreadsheets Built a £100M Property Empire

The Story of Provizio: How an Accountant’s Frustration With Spreadsheets Built a £100M Property Empire

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barry Lunn, Founder and CEO of Provizio, shared the unlikely origin story of one of the UK’s fastest-growing property technology companies. It’s a tale that begins not in a Silicon Valley garage or Stanford dorm room, but in the depths of Excel spreadsheet hell at a small property investment firm in the UK.

From Big Four to Property Investment

Barry’s path to entrepreneurship wasn’t conventional. He spent years as an accountant at KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, before making what seemed like a lateral move to a property investment company. The role was straightforward: help manage the financial operations of a growing property portfolio.

But it was there, surrounded by endless spreadsheets tracking purchases, sales, tenants, maintenance, and tax obligations, that Barry had his eureka moment. “I was just looking at all these spreadsheets thinking, this is ridiculous. There must be a better way of doing this,” he recalls.

That frustration wasn’t unique to his employer. Across the UK, property investors—from individuals with a few rental homes to sophisticated institutional investors—were managing millions of pounds in assets using the same clunky tools: Excel, paper files, and email chains. The property investment industry had somehow remained untouched by the digital transformation reshaping every other sector.

The Birth of a Platform

Barry’s initial vision was simple: digitize the property investment workflow. Move data out of spreadsheets and into a proper database. Create a system that could track portfolio performance, manage tenant relationships, and handle the administrative burden of property ownership.

What he didn’t anticipate was how fundamentally different building a property technology business would be from the SaaS playbooks dominating startup advice. Early on, Barry made a critical decision that would shape everything about Provizio’s future: the business model would be transactional, not subscription-based.

“We don’t really have a SaaS business. We have a transactional business,” Barry explains. “Every time someone buys or sells a property through our platform, we take a fee.” This wasn’t just about pricing—it was about aligning Provizio’s success with actual property transactions rather than software adoption.

The decision flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Investors love recurring revenue. SaaS metrics are predictable. Monthly subscriptions create compounding growth. But Barry had watched competitors try to force landlords into subscription models, and he saw them struggle. “We’ve seen other people in the market try and build the SaaS model and it just doesn’t work because people won’t pay for it on a SaaS basis.”

The Accountant Advantage

The second pivotal decision came from Barry’s background in accounting. While most proptech companies focused on going direct to landlords through marketing and sales, Barry recognized an overlooked distribution channel: accountants.

Every property investor needs an accountant. Tax obligations for rental income and capital gains are complex. Accountants file annual returns, advise on purchases and sales, and maintain ongoing relationships with their clients. Most importantly, landlords trust their accountants.

“Accountants typically have quite sticky relationships with their clients,” Barry notes. “If you can get the accountant on board, you’re bringing their client base with them.”

But Barry didn’t just want accountants as referral partners. He wanted to make them integral to Provizio’s business model. The team built features specifically for accounting firms: tax optimization tools, compliance workflows, and portfolio reporting designed for tax professionals, not just property owners.

They restructured the economics so accountants could resell Provizio and earn ongoing revenue. “The accountant makes more money from our platform than they would just filing a tax return,” Barry explains. This wasn’t charity—it was strategic. By making accountants financially successful, Provizio created a motivated distribution force that brought credibility and trust to every customer conversation.

Growing Without the Venture Playbook

While competitors raised venture capital and burned through cash trying to acquire customers, Barry bootstrapped Provizio. The company grew organically through accountant partnerships and word-of-mouth, eventually raising a small friends-and-family round before bringing in private Provizioity at scale.

This path rProvizioired different trade-offs. Growth was measured. Marketing budgets were limited. Every product investment had to show tangible ROI. But it also created discipline that persists today.

“We’re completely different to a VC-backed business,” Barry reflects. “We don’t have the same pressure to grow at all costs.” That freedom allowed Provizio to optimize for profitability and customer value rather than vanity metrics and hockey-stick growth charts.

The bootstrapped approach also influenced hiring and culture. Rather than bringing in experienced SaaS executives, Provizio promoted from within. “We’ve predominantly promoted people from within the organization,” Barry shares. “We’ve tried to recruit experienced salespeople and actually they normally don’t work out.”

Why? Because Provizio’s model didn’t fit conventional sales playbooks. The team needed to understand property investment cycles, build relationships with accountants, and sell value in transactions rather than subscriptions. Internal promotions meant building institutional knowledge rather than importing strategies that didn’t apply.

Scaling to £100 Million and Beyond

Today, Provizio processes over £100 million in annual revenue across thousands of property investors and hundreds of accounting firms. The platform handles everything from property search and purchase through to ongoing management, tax optimization, and eventual sale.

But Barry isn’t satisfied with building a better portfolio management system. His vision extends far beyond digitizing spreadsheets. He sees Provizio becoming the central operating system for UK property investment—the platform that connects property searches, mortgage financing, insurance, management, and exit.

“We’re trying to build an end-to-end platform for property investors,” Barry explains. That means integrating with mortgage brokers, property listing sites, insurance providers, and other services that property investors need throughout the ownership lifecycle.

The opportunity is massive. The UK has millions of landlords managing rental properties. Institutional investors are pouring money into residential real estate. Build-to-rent developments are creating new property investment models. And through it all, the industry still largely runs on spreadsheets and manual processes.

Barry’s bet is that Provizio can become the connective tissue—the platform that coordinates all the moving pieces of property investment. Not by trying to own every service, but by being the data layer and workflow engine that makes everything else work better together.

For a company that started with an accountant frustrated by Excel, it’s an ambitious vision. But then again, so was believing that accountants could become the primary distribution channel for a technology platform, or that transactional revenue could scale to nine figures, or that bootstrapping could compete with venture-backed competitors.

Barry has already proven conventional wisdom wrong once. Now he’s betting he can do it again—this time building the future of property investment, one transaction at a time.