As Volaris Group celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025, we are publishing a series that examines the individuals, businesses, and milestones that have contributed to the growth of our ecosystem of software businesses.
Transformative change at a business can take several years, and that’s a belief that Volaris has built into its practice of investing in companies on a “forever” time horizon.
In the case of SPARK TSL, that change has been enabled in the five years after being acquired by Volaris. Since then, the company has made two acquisitions, completed a rebranding (renaming the company to SPARK TSL from WiFi SPARK), and most recently, seen the founder choose his successor to the business and accept a new role for himself within Volaris.
The past five years have represented an impressive growth journey for SPARK, a company whose history before Volaris started in 2003.
From a spark of inspiration to a thriving company within Volaris
The company, founded by Matt O’Donovan, began with a simple question: why wasn’t there a way for him to access WiFi at the marina? Seeing a problem in need of a solution, he created a WiFi connectivity platform and initially named his company WiFi SPARK. The company’s first customer owned the marina that inspired his business—the largest marina group in Europe. Seeing that public WiFi connectivity wasn’t commonplace around the country yet, he saw opportunity ahead.
O’Donovan dedicated himself to growing the business and successfully gained clients in the retail, transport, and healthcare markets. All the while, his entrepreneurial spirit never wavered. His family recalls that even while on holiday and sitting by the pool, he was rarely without his laptop, ready to attend to a customer issue or help an employee. By 2017, the company had grown to nearly 50 employees and established a headquarters in Exeter, UK. Their product had also gone through the growth stages of introducing a cloud-based WiFi platform, a network monitoring system, 24/7 help desk, analytics, and WiFi sensors for specialty customers.
By 2019, O’Donovan was looking for the next step that would allow the company to achieve ambitious goals and accelerate growth. He began reviewing his options, and after several long conversations with Volaris, he sold the business in 2020 and remained CEO.
SPARK acquires its largest competitor
In the years immediately after SPARK TSL joined Volaris, the company saw double-digit growth. The company also decided to focus more closely on the healthcare market, making two strategic tuck-in acquisitions that strengthened its position in that market.
The first acquisition involved acquiring SPARK’s biggest competitor, Hospedia, just a year after SPARK joined Volaris. Acquiring Hospedia gave SPARK access to its competitor’s infrastructure within hospitals and provided a springboard to further expand in the healthcare sector in the UK. After the acquisition of Hospedia, SPARK held the largest presence in the NHS in providing patient engagement and entertainment platforms.
However, the acquisition of Hospedia presented a considerable learning experience for the team. Not only was SPARK absorbing a large organization with profitability challenges, Hospedia had also adopted a different company culture. This dynamic was one of the reasons for the company to rebrand from WiFi SPARK to SPARK TSL, so the vision and direction of the two companies could be brought together.
Another challenge of acquiring Hospedia was that its 50,000 patient-facing bedside terminals had gained a negative reputation within the 100 NHS hospitals that they served. Patients did not enjoy having to pay to access entertainment on the outdated bedside units. SPARK decided that something had to change and moved to a model where patients could access entertainment and resources free of charge.
From my point of view as a founder, if we’d made these acquisitions on our own, I would have needed to rely on the advice of external consultants. But being part of Volaris, advice is available off the shelf, so that was a big help.
-Matt O’Donovan, founder and CEO of SPARK TSL from 2003-2024
SPARK updates product after Sentean acquisition
Continuing its work to move away from Hospedia’s model where hospital patients had to pay to access entertainment, SPARK began introducing a platform called Fusion to hospitals in the UK. The new patient engagement platform had already shown success in the Netherlands, where it had been implemented in close to a third of the hospitals with proven patient satisfaction and return on investment.
The new product rollout in the UK was enabled by SPARK having made another strategic acquisition in April 2024—this time it was Sentean Group, the Dutch company behind the Fusion platform. The acquisition gave SPARK a foothold in a new geographic market.
“Acquiring Sentean in the Netherlands was good for SPARK because it set SPARK up with the right products going forward for its growth into the healthcare market where it’s going to be most successful,” O’Donovan said.
“SPARK is a much wider, broader business now because of the acquisitions.”
Finding a successor to lead SPARK into the future
By 2024, Matt O’Donovan was ready for his most personal milestone with the company—looking for a successor to take over operations for the group of companies and bring in a new vision for SPARK.
He found who he was looking for in Jane Stephenson, an executive with close to 30 years of experience at healthcare software businesses. She had been working at a private equity-backed business when approached about the opportunity to lead SPARK.
“One of the things that attracted me to the job was specifically the Volaris culture. What really interested me was the community and kind of support that you get being part of the wider Volaris community,” she said of her decision to join the company as CEO in October 2024. “Joining SPARK isn’t just about joining an individual business, it’s really about getting to work with other leaders in my group and portfolio.”
Matt O’Donovan’s search for a successor was supported by the HR resources at Volaris, who came up with a list of candidates and began the headhunter search.
O’Donovan had grown to be happy working within the Volaris ecosystem, and after conversations with senior leaders at Volaris, O’Donovan took a new role as M&A ambassador, where he can share his experience of selling his business to Volaris with business owners who are in the position he was once in. The role plays to his strength of speaking to people, a skill honed after spending many years on the road talking to customers and making sales as an entrepreneur.
Stagility (stability plus agility) is the type of conflict between creating a stable world, but being agile to be able to go forward and succeed.
Jane Stephenson, CEO of SPARK TSL, 2024-present
SPARK’s future: Growing forever at Volaris
With Volaris taking a “forever invested” approach to all the businesses it acquires, O’Donovan sees SPARK being in good hands after stepping away from the day-to-day operations of the business.
“The healthcare industry is very robust and it will always be around. At the rate at which the healthcare market is accelerating in terms of deployment of apps, there needs to be an app for many of the functions in healthcare, and SPARK can continue to thrive by providing applications and services within that environment,” he says of the company’s future.
The market is massive, the runway is huge and the support from Volaris is there. It’s almost like your perfect model case study of a business and how it should succeed.
-Matt O’Donovan, founder and CEO of SPARK TSL from 2003-2024
He sees the continuous best practice sessions and learning culture as being essential to sustaining the business at SPARK because they cover everything from sales methodologies, marketing techniques, and other functions that are critical to keeping a business going. The central resource capability within Volaris, buying power, and IT resources have also helped SPARK succeed.
Meanwhile, his successor, Jane Stephenson has a vision for the company’s next stage of growth. She is seeing changes in the market and the company’s positioning of its core products and the ability for AI to enable faster product updates.
“We have a new product that we’re pushing out to the market which shows great promise to accelerate our sales while improving patient outcomes,” she says. “It’s great that by making life better for people, an outcome of it is that we make our business better.”
She and O’Donovan are in touch frequently, discussing matters related to the business, but following the Volaris ethos of autonomy for every business, he respects her decisions about where to take the company next based on market conditions and the competitive environment. The Volaris promise to keep a company forever means that a business has to adapt to changing times.
“A challenge for all businesses is moving in a world where we have to be increasingly agile, but our businesses crave stability,” she says about keeping the business up to speed with the pace of market change. “My head of HR introduced me to a fantastic word: stagility. It’s the type of conflict between creating a stable world, but being agile to be able to go forward and succeed.”
