Serco Group

Culture and Values: While our products and processes make us stand out from our competitors, what makes us really different is our culture. What we believe is central to how we view the business and, consequently, how we run the company. At the heart of our culture is the belief that success is an outcome, not a goal. Success comes from focusing on customers, staff and investors and treating them all fairly. Serco is what it is because of what we believe in and how we apply those beliefs. RCA Ltd. is bought out by managers after GE acquires its parent company. Serco Group plc provides facilities management and other engineering services for a variety of governmental and industrial clients in Great Britain and 34 other countries around the world. Unlike traditional support services companies, which typically limit themselves to areas such as catering or cleaning, Serco undertakes the management of complex tasks. Its interests range from testing nuclear weapons to managing parking meters to operating tourist attractions. About 60 percent of turnover comes from within the United Kingdom. Serco has grown as government agencies have privatized more and more services. Despite numerous diversified acquisitions since the 1990s, facilities management accounts for nearly 90 percent of business. Serco's history begins in 1929, when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) established a U.K. subsidiary, RCA Ltd., to service the growing film industry in Britain. In the late 1950s, RCA supplied radomes (a dome structure for protecting radar antennas) for the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) at RAF Flyingdale in Yorkshire. RCA Ltd. supplied most of the workers needed during its construction and won a contract to maintain the facility. The company would maintain this relationship into the new millennium. In the 1980s, the U.K. Ministry of Defence used this program as a model for its privatization of operation and maintenance functions at defense facilities. The cost-cutting of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's administration in the 1980s provided many other opportunities for RCA Ltd. By the early 1980s, the company also was managing traffic light systems. The European Space Agency (ESA), formed in 1975, provided another area of expansion. RCA Ltd. contracted to maintain ESA's computer networks and satellites. General Electric (GE) acquired RCA in 1986. RCA Ltd.'s managers bought their unit from GE for $24 million in 1987. The newly independent company was named Serco Limited. Serco, led by Chairman George Gray, who had been with the company since 1964, listed on the London Stock Exchange as Serco Group plc in 1988. In 1989, Serco began branching out to Asia and the Pacific Rim and launched an expansion into civil government and commercial markets. Several small acquisitions, together worth £1.4 million, in 1990 brought Serco into the management of central government facilities in Australia and New Zealand and bolstered the company's business with local governments inside the United Kingdom. The Times observed that Serco was unique in not limiting itself to one or two discrete areas of support, such as catering or cleaning. The company began running hospitals for Britain's National Health Service (NHS). Total revenues approached $200 million by 1991. In May of that year, Serco entered a new market by acquiring Community Leisure Management. A couple of months later, the company and European Handling Management formed the Serair joint venture to provide an array of support services for airlines. Serco continued to acquire companies, enter new markets, and form new structures in the mid-1990s. In 1993, the same year it entered the North American market, Serco bought Building Management Scotland; it soon obtained contracts to operate parts of the United Kingdom's traffic signal system. The Serco Institute was created in 1994. The launch of Serco Investments followed the next year. In the mid-1990s, Serco bid on several projec