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Focus: Enter the Cloud
Welcome to Focus: Enter the Cloud! The podcast that dives deep into the world of cloud technology and the people in the space.
Host Lloyd Gordon explores it all, from the latest trends, innovations, insights in the cloud space all the way through to the things that make the professionals tick. We explore mindsets, challenges, successes, work life balance, and everything in between.
We provide our listeners with perspectives from some of the most influential voices and minds in the space.
Whether you're a seasoned cloud professional or just starting your journey in the field, Enter the Cloud is here to help you stay informed about the developments and advancements in cloud tech and prepare your mindset for what comes next!
From engineers to CTOs and executives, our guests come from a variety of backgrounds and bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table.
So, join us on this exciting journey as we explore the world of cloud technology and connect with the people who are shaping the future of the industry.
Focus: Enter the Cloud
Focus: Enter the Cloud - Shifting Mindset: Embracing Cloud Solutions & Building Successful Teams
The conversation covers Matt Lawrence's journey from PeopleSoft to co-founding a successful Workday consultancy, navigating the challenges of building and selling a business, and the impact of COVID-19 on the cloud market. It also explores the decision to leave a large global partner and the shift in mindset towards cloud solutions. The conversation covers the evolution of the Workday ecosystem, key decisions that led to business success, the transition of the business, and the future of cloud markets and AI. It also delves into the stress and challenges faced in the business journey, the importance of building successful teams, and advice for those entering the workday ecosystem.
Key Takeaways:
- Matt Lawrence's journey from PeopleSoft to co-founding a successful Workday consultancy
- Challenges of building and selling a business
- Impact of COVID-19 on the cloud market
- Shift in mindset towards cloud solutions
- Decision to leave the Workday ecosystem and pursue a new challenge
-The Workday ecosystem has evolved significantly, with a focus on cloud-based solutions and the potential of AI integration.
- Key decisions, such as transitioning from a small boutique to a large global SI and focusing on Workday recruitment, have been instrumental in business success.
- The journey has been marked by stress and challenges, including financial pressures and legal issues, but strategic decisions and support have led to growth and success.
- Building successful teams involves hiring individuals who share the company's values, trust, and empowerment, and having a diverse mix of personalities and skills.
- Advice for those entering the Workday ecosystem includes specializing in a niche area and becoming an expert in that field, as well as being open to branching out into other areas as the business grows.
Chapters:
00:00 - The Journey from PeopleSoft to Workday Consultancy
03:16 - Building and Selling a Successful Business
36:28 - Shifting Mindset: Embracing Cloud Solutions
38:41 - Transitioning from Alight to a New Challenge
39:51 - Evolution of the Workday Ecosystem
41:33 - Key Decisions and Business Success
51:12 - Navigating Stress and Challenges
01:03:35 - Building Successful Teams
01:11:02 - The Future of Cloud Markets and AI
01:13:57 - Advice for Entering the Workday Ecosystem
Check out more of the Focus Cloud Group Podcasts and chats on your favourite media players!
Youtube, Spotify, Apple, Google!
Welcome back to another episode of Focus into the Cloud. Today we are joined by Matt Lawrence and we're going to explore his journey from PeopleSoft to co-founding a successful boutique workday consultancy. We'll cover building and selling a business, key decisions for success and the future of the cloud market, and AI Plus. We'll also be sharing valuable advice for newcomers to the Workday ecosystem. So, without further ado, let's get into it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to everyone to this episode of Enter the Cloud. I'm very, very pleased to be joined by Matt Lawrence, the EMEA commercial lead from Advisors. Welcome, Matt. Thank you, Lawrence.
Speaker 3:Good to be here.
Speaker 2:Good to be here chatting to you. Yeah, great to be in your presence, as I should say Likewise, matt. Thank you, lawrence, good to be here. Good to be here chatting to you. Yeah, great to be in your presence, as I should say Likewise, likewise Now you've been. Obviously Workday is kind of your background right, but I'm interested to see where did Matt Lawrence, where was Matt Lawrence born? Not where you was born, but where was the career born and what led you towards? Ultimately it was cloud and then the stuff that went afterwards.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so cloud is a long time ago now. We found the business in 2010. So, yeah, that's kind of 14 years ago, which seems an absolute lifetime. But I did have a life before that and I was actually in the people-soft world. So, like quite a few people in the Workday space, I came from that background. I've been doing PeopleSoft for a number of years. Before that kind of worked my way up. I was a technical consultant, building reports, changing the system. Peoplesoft was very different to Workday in that you could hack it apart. You could completely customise the system inside out.
Speaker 2:So I remember, yeah, I remember it, you were there as well. Yeah, I was. Uh, I was helping a few customers to find some contractors and a few permies back in the day. I was originally, originally an oracle recruiter. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, we kind of crossed paths with oracle when, when the takeover happened, which I think was 2005,. Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and yes, in my own journey, kind of just stuck around with PeopleSoft for a long time and, you know, worked my way up, kind of a very traditional route. I guess you'd call it technical side, functional side, team lead, project management, account management.
Speaker 2:What led you towards PeopleSoft, though I don't want to talk too much about your previous life before PeopleSoft, but tell me about you know, your degree, your university, and then where you thought you would be in that first five years after university and then, ultimately, where you ended up. Well, I am.
Speaker 3:I actually did an economics degree purely because I enjoyed economics and it seemed like something that might lead to bigger and better things. I really had no plan, no idea what was going to happen, but I'd always been quite technical, I'd always tinkered with computers and stuff. So when I graduated I just started applying for jobs, as you did, and I applied for a job that was a graduate trainee for an IT company called Fi Group Don't exist anymore. So I started with them and then very quickly realized tinkering with computers was very different to programming. It was COBOL, it was very old school stuff.
Speaker 3:We did a lot on the Y2K bug, as it was known, and I realized that absolutely was not for me. I, you know, wasn't cut out to be a programmer at all, so kind of just looked around within that internal business and thought how can I get out of this particular area I'm in now and FI group themselves were deploying PeopleSoft. So I managed to just kind of got myself onto that internal project, really just kind of a sideways step. They were looking for people to come on board, so did the training and just from there. That's really where that all started.
Speaker 2:Did you start as a technical people's off consultant? Yeah, so cutting code, writing reports, sequel all that good stuff, but it's not the same as being a programmer from an IT side. It's a bit more interesting. I think yeah, if you look at the vision as well.
Speaker 3:when you start doing COBOL programming on programs written in the 1960s, that's all you can see your future and I was working alongside guys who'd been doing it for 20 years and I thought you know absolutely got to get out of here. When you start in something like PeopleSoft world or the ERP world, you can see many paths throughout that kind of career that are much more interesting than the kind of technical stuff that I was doing. So again I saw that as a main means to kind of step up the ladder a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay. So how long did you stay as a technical consultant before you obviously went into the functional side of PeopleSoft?
Speaker 3:Yeah, god, I'm going back a lot now, lloyd, it was probably two or three years, I guess, I mean I can't remember exactly, but it was that kind of thing. But also I've never had a single role and that's been it. It's always been kind of start doing this and then pick up some other things. As you go along and you start doing, you know, on a project, you start working different things wearing multiple hats.
Speaker 3:so it was kind of a transition rather than a black and white stop doing this one day and start doing the next yeah I think for me again it was more interesting to get into the project management side, that that to me was kind of where I wanted to get to, where I stepped to quicker than being in the functional side of the house.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when did the sales element of your role come out? Yeah, again, because technical consultant to a little bit more on the functional side and then obviously the project management side. Where did the sales element come from?
Speaker 3:Again, I just kind of fell into it and and I think, um, you'll appreciate this, just, you know always been good at talking to people and and people respond to you. People start asking questions around well, how do we get this, that and the other in the system? So then you, kind of almost without realizing it, you start selling stuff. You start saying, okay, well, we can also do that for you, and there's this other module we could do for you. So you, just through talking, through having that conversation I think it was good having that, certainly the technical background, but also the system overall, just understanding how the system hangs together, different parts of it, et cetera and then you can talk knowledgeably about what the customer's asking for and how you can do it. So they take you seriously. And before I knew it, you're then kind of selling another six months PeopleSoft project on the back of what we've just done to deploy it.
Speaker 2:Was there a point in time where you thought this is my way here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it probably was, and it was probably within that transition, I guess that the talking to people, the understanding, the requirements, the stitching it together for them. You kind of just think, actually I know what I'm doing here and says I feel comfortable in it. Not that I hadn't felt that comfortable, you know what I was doing before but just more natural, more easy to do that kind of stuff okay, so fast forward pre cloud, right?
Speaker 2:so what were you doing then? And? And how did cloud? How was it founded? I sort of remember when I founded Focus Cloud. Not with a K, obviously. And the transition period of choosing a name and the realization that you're actually going to do this as well. Right, so, let's go sort of six months back pre-cloud. What were you doing?
Speaker 3:So probably a little bit further than six months. I was working with Ian Maslin and John Barrett, so they had a pretty successful PeopleSoft consultancy. But we realised that the PeopleSoft world was falling apart. That takeover from Oracle just the market was not responding well to it. So customers were not doing much. They certainly weren't taking on that takeover from Oracle, just the market was not responding well to it. So customers were not doing much. They certainly weren't taking on new PeopleSoft projects. So it was maintenance, it was AMS type stuff, and we realised that actually we had to do something different. So the three of us just got together over a pint and started having a chat about it. What should we do? Let's start looking at other systems. They were the obvious ones your Oracles, your SAPs, your Microsofts.
Speaker 2:This is their previous consulting. Yeah, this is the PeopleSoft business.
Speaker 3:So we realised that actually we had to kind of transition away from it to survive as a business.
Speaker 3:So it was quite a sink or swim mentality. Again, through the PeopleSoft links we had some connections to Workday, some US consultancies that we kind of spoke to and just links. We had some connections to Workday, some US consultancies that we spoke to and just said, hey, what's this Workday all about? From then we just thought this is it absolutely. We saw the product. We went to a demo just down the road here in London. It must have been about late 2008, 2009. We just thought this is absolutely what our customers need from a system. This is not what they're getting from any of those other systems we've spoken about.
Speaker 3:Workday absolutely has nailed it. So we thought, right, how the hell are we going to do this? How the hell are we going to do a Workday business? So the three of us put our heads together. You asked about the name. Yeah, I think we just kind of sat there one night again, probably in a bar bar, just having a chat over a few drinks, and the name cloud with a k was born. I mean what other ones were there? I can't remember. I mean, we're going back.
Speaker 2:I know we're going, I know we're going back a long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we, um, we wanted just to be something that was. It didn't really mean anything. So you know, not, not system components, xyz. It was something that was just a word we wanted to be. I remember we wanted to be at the front of the alphabet rather than the back of it, just because, again, you know, you look at listings on a company, you start calling the ones at the top of that list. You know just basic stuff, which probably is meaningless nowadays, but but that's what we did. So cloud with a k was born and we thought it's a little bit different. Cloud computing is is the in thing back then. It's what everyone's starting to talk about. So let's be linked to that. Let's be linked to that. It's a really cool name. It's a really really cool name.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember the first time I came across you guys, the first thing I thought was that's a cool name. It really did stick out. It was like with a K, like it really did stick out because it was like with a K, like can you spell that? That's really cool and it sticks in your mind, doesn't it? You know? So you set up a new business, we did so, you. What happened to the old PeopleSoft business?
Speaker 3:well, there were two reasons for that one was, although we saw that business as depleting, it was still a relatively successful business. We had a number of kind of AMS customers. We were just keeping the lights on keeping things going along. So we thought actually let's not kind of disrupt that, because if this newfangled cloud thing doesn't take off as we think it will, then there's always this other business that we can fall back and rely on. Plus, there was lots of animosity between workday and Oracle, who obviously owned PeopleSoft at the time. So we thought let's just have a kind of degree of separation between it.
Speaker 3:So we set up a brand new business and what we actually did was we started transitioning the employees from the old PeopleSoft business into cloud and then we would sub them back to do AMS work. So the reason we did that not to cheat accounting or anything like that was because we had to have employees of the business to be trained on workday. They had to be approved to be employees of that business, whereas anyone could be a people's self-consultant those days. So it was kind of a tactical decision, like let's bring people over, we can then get them trained on workday. We're then ready with this business, but we've got money coming in through this other route. So that's kind of what we did, why we had the two businesses. That was. That was super, super early, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:that was, it was 2010, 2010. So in in the UK you guys were the first consultancy yeah, doing work day, first ones outside North America how many customers were there in the UK. There was one customer in the UK at that time. I knew it was super, super early. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again I mean Workday.
Speaker 3:I think they'd just bought Cape Clear in Dublin in Ireland, so we knew that Europe was going to be the next kind of hunting ground for them. They had two sales guys based here. They had no office, so it was a leap of faith. It really was, but you know, looking back it was the right time to do it.
Speaker 2:Was there ever a time when you thought in the early days of cloud? Was there ever a?
Speaker 3:time when you thought, oh, this was a mistake. Yeah, absolutely there was. And I think again the three of us, with Ian and John and myself, we used to sit down and you know, look at this successful but declining business versus a business over here which was just cost and thinking, hang on, a minute we've got, how long are we going to give this to actually till things start to move?
Speaker 3:but you know, within six months Workday had an office in London. They had people on the ground here. They brought some of their US team over to help them set set the business up. Because we were the only ones we committed, we proved the work that we were doing, we were serious about it. So they actually said, okay, fine, we'll sub some work to you and we sell deals. So money started coming in. So I'd say probably that six month period was a little bit difficult, but we held on, we held on, we held on, we held on.
Speaker 2:It's the most, it's the most. Uh, touching part of a business, isn't it? It is yeah.
Speaker 3:But even after that, you know when you're. You've got a young business, you've got salaries to pay. People are relying on you. You haven't had an invoice paid and you're getting to the end of the month. You're thinking, okay, this is, this is getting serious, now exactly pay the, uh, the salaries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we haven't taken any money yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah yeah, so again that first, probably 18 months was a lot of that, just really by the seat of our pants and you know, fortunately work day was going really tremendously well and growing significantly. So but then you got the balance as well.
Speaker 3:You know this very well. Of right, we need four more people, but shit, we haven't got any money to actually pay them. How are we going to figure this out? Okay, well, let's take two on, get them out straight away, and then by the end of the month we might have enough cash to actually go and employ some more people. So it was very much kind of hand to mouth in those days. Wow yeah.
Speaker 2:So were there times when the three of you were sitting down, kind of, you know, pulling your hair out. I say yeah. You've not had many times like that, have you Matt.
Speaker 3:Well, a little bit more safe in that than you are yeah again. I think there were lots of challenging conversations in those early days just around. You know what the hell are we going to do? You know, clearly we could see that it was the right decision and Workday was growing and other partners, certainly the big boys were starting to do it. So we thought, okay, you know, if they're doing it, we've got something right here. We're definitely on the right path.
Speaker 3:But still you know you've got to kind of, you've got to pay salaries and things have to come out.
Speaker 2:You hit the curve before the curve started, really, didn't you?
Speaker 3:That was super, super early. I think in reality we were probably about six-ish months too early. But if we hadn't have done it, we might not have been taken seriously by Workday, because they would have had the big boys on board. They would have had some other, probably established consultancies doing it, rather than just three blokes who thought it was a good idea and convinced someone in Workday to trust them. So yeah, I think we really hit that kind of sweet spot of timing. So, you, win your first project.
Speaker 2:Who was the first project with?
Speaker 3:My God. Well, we did sub work originally through Workday first of all, and some of the other big players actually came to us and subbed to us. So our first, probably year was really just subbing the first one we won directly was I think it was ISS, which is not the ISS Not then there's a shipping company called ISS. That were one of the early ones. So, yeah, that was a win, and ERM as well. That was an early one for us. Erm, environmental, yeah, research management.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So talk to me about the first. You win this project and I know what it's like. You're trying to get this business off the ground and there's you know it's a rocky road in the first six months, right, and there's there's times when you think this was a mistake and then other times you think this was a great idea and then you win this project. What happened with the three of you on the moment you won the project?
Speaker 3:well, yeah, I mean, there was lots of uh, lots of high-fiving, lots of fantastic. We've won our own business. You know, just kind of we've done it, guys, well done. You know we've arrived, we've actually made it this far, um, but then very quickly the reality sets that, oh crap, we've got to deliver this now. You know, we've got a great team of people. We know that we trust them. None of these people we work with for many, many years, so we didn't have any concerns there. Um, the three of us also got certified in Workday as well, because we wanted to understand the system. We wanted to help with that early things.
Speaker 3:And again your earlier question around sales. It helps selling it to actually understand it and be able to talk knowledgeably about the system and how it hangs together. But it did mean that the three of us had to roll our sleeves up and actually get stuck in, and we all worked on those early projects.
Speaker 3:What did you do? On the first one, I think I was the project manager Project manager, okay, which, learning it as we went along, we were a page in the manual. Thinking right, what do we do? Now we're at this stage of the system, fantastic.
Speaker 2:It's a totally different system, though, isn't it? To PeopleSoft?
Speaker 3:It's obviously in the cloud. So what type of issues did you come across? I mean, the issues are the same, I think interestingly different system, but issues are the same. So you know, customer data is always a problem on any system. They've got the wrong data. It's not tidy data. That's a problem regardless of the system. If anything, with cloud it's a bit more visible and you can't go in the back door to fix it, so it's there when you go live your data's there.
Speaker 3:I think the problems we had in those days were actually limitations of the system, I think because Workday was a new product and these were all HR projects. By the way, there were no financial projects here in those days. So it was kind of well, workday doesn't do a lot of the things that they want the system to do. And these customers who were coming off PeopleSoft, oracle, sap they were used to getting out of the system what they wanted. You couldn't do that with Workday. Saas-based, it was delivery model, it was configurable, not customisable. So those were the challenges when a customer was saying I need this, that, and the other at my system and saying, well, it doesn't do that, sorry. So it was more of a challenging conversation than a kind of system limitation conversation. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Did you have a lot of issues early days with cloud adoption Because you kind of hit it before the world started to really consider cloud as a viable option for their software.
Speaker 3:Yeah, good question, because I remember the conversation in those days and I can't remember the point it flipped, but it was probably three or four years later. But we had to explain what cloud meant. We had to explain what the SaaS delivery model meant. We had to explain that you don't need a room full of servers and your own DBAs and all that kind of stuff. And that was half the battle in those days to explain it. Because they saw the system, they saw what demo worked and said that's amazing, we want it. But then you had to explain what it meant with cloud.
Speaker 3:Security always came up. Well, I don't want my data in the cloud. It means anyone can access it. No, we can't. And actually it's more secure. And here's some case studies and here's some examples as to why your data is more secure. Look at work they, look at how they protect data, protect their own kind of infrastructure, etc. So it was a really interesting conversation those days and it was more about the cloud. It was probably 60 70 percent of the conversation was about the cloud and SaaS and then the rest of it was just about the project, the functionality of the system.
Speaker 3:And that did switch. As you say, cloud became the go-to delivery model and everyone started understanding cloud. I mean, salesforce had been doing it for a while, so I think Salesforce were kind of trailblazers in that respect and then, as people started to understand it more and it was just accepted. And now you don't even. You know. No one mentions it's cloud, it's just okay.
Speaker 2:So it's almost like now nowadays, customers don't even think about implementing a product that's on-prem. Yeah, exactly, it's like why would you do that? Yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:Why would I have to buy a server?
Speaker 2:doesn't make any sense yeah, yeah, okay, so years-wise we are what 2012, 2013. Now yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:And you built this business to be the most successful work they consult in, certainly in the UK, if not EMEA. At what point did you think, oh my God, this is working Because there is a transition isn't there. Like as a business, as a founder of a business, you think you go through like the first year or the first two years, and then there is a realisation within yourself. You don't necessarily tell anyone, but you know within yourself this is working yeah, and it was around that period, I think 2013, probably late 2013, we had our first phone call from someone saying you've got great business here.
Speaker 3:let's have a chat about the next stage, about investing, about equity in it, about selling the business, etc. And then you start to realise, wow, if other people are interested, then that does mean we've done something right, we've got a good model here. So it was probably about that period, I mean, I think, to be honest, though, we were all just running 100 miles an hour and ridiculously busy running projects, selling stuff, you know, getting new people on board, training them that you don't really have time to think Again. I'm sure you've been through exactly the same.
Speaker 3:Oh yes, oh yes, yeah, you're just trying to survive each month and not really worry about what's going to happen in six months' time. What about?
Speaker 2:the work rate. So more on the personal side here, right, yeah, you know, having a career as a PeopleSoft consultant and somewhat working, you know your typical five days a week, having your weekends off, and then you start this business cloud.
Speaker 3:Um, you know, I don't even have to ask you, but I'm sure it wasn't five days a week no, not at all, and again, I think, if you think about the speed we were running at, the fact we were involved in delivery, involved in selling, involved in recruiting, involved in workday conversations, partnerships, etc. That, yeah, it was a seven day a week job. The difference was, though and I think something that Workday brought to the table that was very different was it was a remote working model, so we didn't have to be on customer site, whereas in the PeopleSoft days you used to have stuff to get up in the morning, get in your car and go on a train, etc, travel to customer site. You'd be there for eight hours. You then travel home.
Speaker 3:There was a lot of wasted time right with the workday model, actually, you could service those customers remotely, and we did service customers throughout Europe and further afield actually, so we were able to do stuff without needing to be traveling every single day, so I think that freed up some time, so you had the time that you would have just been wasted commuting. You could use that for for other things which you know were then helping to grow the business so that was quite a shift as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how about you within yourself? So what? What point did you start to change as an individual? And how did this business affect your family, because I know you've got children as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all that comes into play, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it does, and I think it's interesting at that period, especially because I had young kids at the time. How old were your kids? They were about four and one at that period, okay, so yeah, busy time at home running around doing stuff. So yeah, it was a challenge. I think it was a challenge, but I made sure I was there for the important times, the birthdays. I made sure that I was okay. If I was working at weekends, at least I was going to be at home and I'd spend time with them. I wanted to be active in, you know, bath time, bedtime. So if it meant, okay, I'll have a couple of hours where I'm not working, I can pick the laptop off after that, yeah, so again it was just about that kind of mind shift of doing things differently to accommodate the family life.
Speaker 3:But I think now again we're all used to that. Everyone's used to to working on their terms. So I think it was probably quite new at that time. But now people don't bat an eyelid to it at all.
Speaker 3:What are things that you missed what in terms of family life? Oh, for sure, for sure, and you know probably about that period as well, I think. I started travelling. We expanded the business across the rest of Europe. So we had customers in Scandinavia, we did some work in France, we opened an office in Paris, we had people in Poland and the Netherlands, etc. So travel became much more focused and it wasn't just getting the train into London, it was getting a flight from Heathrow to somewhere else. So one, two nights a week I was somewhere else and not at home. So yeah, absolutely you miss stuff.
Speaker 3:But technology helps you be there. You can video call home to see the kids, that kind of stuff. Yeah, okay, all right, cool.
Speaker 2:So the first transaction, let's say, talk to me about the first transaction of cloud. And was that always the plan with cloud as well?
Speaker 3:Well, in terms of selling the business. It wasn't always the plan and, to be honest, we wanted to grow a successful business. Now, we knew at some point there could be an exit, such as an acquisition or some other method, but that wasn't why we did it. So it was a very interesting time. As I said, people started knocking on the door and we started having conversation with people. So, yeah, it was a very interesting, probably six to 12 months, because all of a sudden to your earlier point we started realising we've done something right here. We've actually built something that people are interested in. There is value to this.
Speaker 3:What does that mean for us individually? We wanted it to be successful for the people that we brought on board. We wanted them to have a career and success, etc. Etc. Um, and, and the reason that we we chose a on hewitt as much as they chose us was a lot of it was to do with their north american practice, because there was a company in North America called Omnipoint and we knew those guys. They'd actually helped us out when we started the business and we met them at one of the workday conferences over in San Francisco, chatted to them. Really nice group of people got on well with them, supported us in those early days. They then sold the business to Aon Hewitt. So we realised actually, you know, working with like-minded people, there was a lot to be said for that that we knew we could be the European arm to what they'd already done in North America, which was very successful and something we aspired to. So I think that for us was quite a direction of travel, if you like.
Speaker 2:Yeah and how many? How many other interested parties at the Aon Hewitt transaction did you have?
Speaker 3:There were definitely four other people at the time. A couple of them were just tie kickers. So you kind of have conversations with them and realize it's not very straightforward. A couple of them were very serious and we got to good conversations with them and sat down around a table you know, not quite lawyers at dawn, but not far off it but then decided, okay, we really need to focus on one of these guys and went down the Al Hewer route.
Speaker 2:Okay, and how easy or how hard was the transition?
Speaker 2:Because you go from being a founder and being able to do People Do I say this you go from being a founder and being able to do whatever you want. But that's not actually the case, is it? No, it's not at all. People think that you can, just because you own the business, you do whatever you want and actually you're working. You know, double the time. Everyone else is right yeah, but then going over to having a boss? Yeah, right, yeah, um, but then going over to having a boss, yeah. How did you find?
Speaker 3:that so interesting and I think you make a great point that that it's bloody hard work. Yeah, I'm looking at you here, knowing you've put a lot of hours, sweat and tears into what you do. I look like that. You look very well to be fair.
Speaker 2:You got some miles on you right hard paper rounds.
Speaker 3:So you know you go from that thing period of having a lot of stress. It's all on your shoulders. You know you've got to remortgage your own house. Well, that's impacting your family life potentially. So you know there's a lot of things that happen with your own business. You sell the business. It doesn't go away overnight because you've still got challenges. You've still got.
Speaker 3:You know numbers to hit it's not just a case of right. Here are the keys and off you go. It's a case of right. Well, within this two-year period, you've got to do this, this, and there's the numbers have to be right. You have to do this with them.
Speaker 3:Initially, with the boss side of things, the boss was in North America, so actually that gave me a fair amount of leeway to still run the business. They were very adamant. They were great in terms of saying look, you've got a successful business, you've got a brand. The brand's not particularly well-known outside the workday side of things, so that won't stick around, but your people are great, what you've built is great, your customers are fantastic. So we want you to keep doing what you've been doing.
Speaker 3:There was no overnight change. It was transitional change of things like IT and infrastructure and offices etc. Which took I don't know, six to 12 months. So all in all, actually it was quite way to to to move into the new business. Yeah, I mean, we did. We moved into the cheese grater when aeon took that on board and and I think that point to me was very different because we'd stayed in our own cloud office, just us, you know little office around the corner. All of a sudden we're in this massive skyscraper in london thinking, oh crap, okay, this is now a very big company.
Speaker 2:So size of the business at this stage?
Speaker 3:So pre-acquisition and then post-acquisition, yeah so the cloud business was about 100 people across Europe. Obviously, aon was 80,000 globally, but the workday practice I forget the numbers it was something like 500 globally. So we were 100 in Europe and there were about 50 of the Aon Hewitt people based in mainly in Poland. There were a couple in London. So we kind of absorbed them into our business as well. So we grew the European practice to about 200, 250 in that two-year period.
Speaker 2:So year we're talking about here 2015. 2015,. Yes, I remember it very well Because you just set up in. Was it 2014? No, we set up in September 2015. Oh, okay, right, september 2015. I first came across Workday in 2014. I was an SAP recruiter at the time, yeah, and I picked up the Philippus project and they they came to me and said that we decided to implement this product called Workday and, being an SAP recruiter and a previous Oracle recruiter, I was a bit like Workday, what's what's Workday? You know, I hadn't heard of it. Really, 2014, it's like what's workday. Do you remember those times when you used to? You used to meet people when they had to say what do you do? And, of course, for you it was yeah, I run a workday consultancy and people would go what's workday? You know, that was when we set up, right, um, and I and I literally just stumbled across it and I thought this is very, very early as it still was in EMEA then, and day one for us we just went work day.
Speaker 2:It was obvious. It was obvious to have that part of the business and after one year then we shut down the other parts of the business and just went 100% work day, which was when all the partners started to mobilise their practices in 2016. You will remember it well, I do indeed, so you were Aon at the time, yep.
Speaker 3:I think what we noticed was actually, you know, big companies, very big, very successful. There's lots of people doing things. So there were ways into companies. So we'd say, oh, company x might be looking at work there. Okay, well, actually we've done some work with company x in the business over here so we were able to kind of get through, navigate our way to, to meet people and see customers that we just had no way of getting to at all. But then the the flip side of that is internal bureaucracy. Well, you can't talk to that customer because they belong to the risk business and actually you're not allowed to talk to them. Well, what is that? I'm just a simple sales guy. I don't understand what that means. But, okay, we won't talk to them customers. But can we see these ones over here?
Speaker 2:Well, you can do, but you need to go and talk to that account manager and that salesperson and they need to introduce you so the frustrating.
Speaker 3:Then you're waiting for the introduction to come which may or may not come exactly exactly.
Speaker 3:And there are also things like um, you know you want to sell maybe a small project, just to get your foot in the door to someone, knowing that it's going to lead to a much bigger project later on. Well, you can't do that because there's certain criteria you have to meet. So it's too small, the margins too low, etc. So those kind of rules start to come into play and from being the smaller company, where it was just three of us saying, should we do it? Yeah, we shall fantastic, move on to okay, fill out this form, put it over here, speak to this person, get approval from this person, starts to kind of wear you down, in a sense, just from that freedom. Is that what happened?
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much Okay. Okay, so fast forward until the next transaction, because I don't want to go too much into the wear and down part, because I'll probably ask you a few questions that you don't want to answer, but yeah at what point did you think right?
Speaker 3:so actually and it's a really interesting just from a timing perspective that I was starting to think, yeah, wow, this is, this is overly bureaucratic and not not necessarily what I signed up for. Um, and then the uh, a light announcement happened that we were divesting pretty much the whole of aeon hewitt off from aeon.
Speaker 3:So all a sudden it was interesting because it was something different, something new, something quite fresh and for the European practice, pretty much it was my bit. It was work day, so it was okay. Right, Big in the US there's all this benefit stuff that we don't deal with because it's US only. Over here it was almost back to a small nimble right, go and do your thing, go and do what you need to do again yeah, there was still some of that internal bureaucracy, but it was much easier than it had been.
Speaker 3:So I think for me, if that hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't stuck around the fact that happened at that time was a case of okay, this, this is now interesting. Let's hang around and see what, what this turns into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay so talk to me about the, the first, uh, six to 12 to 18 months of a light, as opposed to aeon.
Speaker 3:Well, I think the first, well, the first few months we didn't even have a name, so it was a, it was a challenge for many, many reasons. But you know, obviously we went through that process and came up with the name of light and really really good um structure and leadership in the light and and it was lots of flexibility, lots of flexibility to do things. You know how we've done them. Before we had this big US backing, so there was money there for, you know, marketing events, etc so again it was.
Speaker 3:It was really nice, it was fun. Great team on board again, I think. For me it's always back to the people. A lot of these people have stuck around since the cloud days and the people soft business before that, so it was a good, trusted group of people that I like working with.
Speaker 2:Yeah we started doing business with you actually around that sort of time. Yeah, we helped you build your practice quite significantly, if I remember and actually I think you were really useful.
Speaker 3:Uh, outside the UK, because I think we wanted to move into Germany. We were doing a lot of work up in the Nordics, netherlands, and I think you guys were very good at helping with those places where we didn't have the personal connections that we did here. So it was really good to get you guys on board and help with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're now at light and we're coming to the end, let's say the end of a light. What kind of caused you to think my future is probably outside of a light?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a well first of all, it was a very difficult decision. You know as a company and again the people that I really liked to work with a long time. A lot of them I consider friends and still do today. So it wasn't something that I just kind of thought on a whim.
Speaker 3:I think it was probably just fatigue, you know it was. I've been doing workday for so long 10, 11 years at this period and I still love workday, the product, the company, the business, the people, etc. But just thought you know what, maybe it's time for a change. And it was almost like a personal challenge. I wanted to see was I successful because I know workday, or could I go and do something else outside of the Workday sphere? And so I think for me I just wanted a bit of a kick up the backside. Go and do something different. Go and just get out of your comfort zone, Exactly that exactly that.
Speaker 3:Just go and challenge yourself to do something a bit different. So that's really what happened. How long was you thinking about it before it happened?
Speaker 2:so that's really what happened how long was you thinking about it before it happened?
Speaker 3:probably a while, probably subconsciously a long time, but consciously probably a good 6 to 8, 12 months, I guess, just thinking what else is there? Covid, happened at the time and that obviously just completely changed things. You did a podcast for us actually didn't you.
Speaker 2:I did, yeah, yeah, yeah, in COVID. That's right, and we spoke about the impact on a light during COVID and stuff, so we won't go too much into that, but you can see that on some of our social channels if you're interested, so you come out of a light. Do you think this decision was?
Speaker 3:COVID-fuelled. I think it probably was looking back and I think COVID was just such an impact on life in general. But back to your question about family. I'd spent the last 10 years travelling not excessively, mostly in Europe one, two nights away, that kind of stuff but it has an impact. Covid happens. I'm at home all the time. Now I guess people would either go completely stir crazy or you just accept it and enjoy the time with the family. And I did that.
Speaker 3:It was great actually going out for bike rides with the kids, being at home helping them with homework, which I'd probably neglected to a degree, if I'm honest. So I think for me actually, it was a case of right. Well, this is something very different, the way we are, the way we think, the way we process things. So I think it was all built up in that again the kind of just subconscious what's going on in your brain. Time for a change, so yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that was the time when the cloud market really kicked off. Yeah, because you built a business before the economy really went to cloud.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, we spoke about the on-prem and there were still lots and lots of SAP and other on-premise solution implementations in 2018 and 2019. I guess you know work. They were up against you know XYZ vendor and probably lost you know a fair few of them because they were on-prem, because the market hadn't really changed their mindset and in COVID it was we have to let everyone work from home. Oh, my god, we've got an on-prem solution. We better go to cloud.
Speaker 3:Yes, so you must have really capitalized on that yeah, absolutely, and I think a lot of people kind of woke up and realized we can't rely on on-premise, we can't rely on this traditional way of working, and we've been working remotely for 10 years, yeah, so all of a sudden, our model was the default model, which was which was crazy when you think about it. I remember that.
Speaker 2:I remember that. Now you now you say about that right, we, we were recruiting a lot of people for the partner ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, and a lot of people were. I think that the conversation about remote working started probably 2018, 2019. And a lot of the Workday partners still had on-site presence. So the big ones yeah, a lot of them, and the people that really wanted to work remote. There was a couple of options and you guys were one of those options.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I remember that and it's really interesting because I think the workday methodology, the workday way of deploying things, the fact it's cloud-based, mean a you didn't have to be sat on site with a customer all day long, and there are periods when it's really beneficial to do that, when you're, you know, up front, designing the system, when you're talking about things, when you help with them, do testing very, very beneficial. But also the model meant that you could work on two, three customers at the same time in a week, in a day. So if you're traveling to be on site, you just can't do that. So actually, if you're working from your office or your home base, you can then work these three different customers. You dial into them. You do one, you know, three hours in the morning, then you do another one over lunchtime and then your third one the afternoon and I think that model just really meant that the the home working or the remote option was was just a much more efficient way of working yeah
Speaker 2:I've just written written this down before I forget to ask you. Matt, you know, I heard something very interesting the other day from my chairman and he said when you're growing a business, your success comes down to one or two decisions, Like you can either go this way or you go that way and that ultimately has a huge impact into your success.
Speaker 2:When you look back, from the moment that you started cloud to ultimately exiting Alight, were there. Give me two key points where, when you think back, if you had chosen to do something else, perhaps you wouldn't have been that successful well, tough, tough question and got to reach back in the depths of memory.
Speaker 3:I think one thing we did very early, so, as I said, we started out work, they didn't have an office in the UK. When work they open office in London, we open an office in the same building right and I think that was fundamental, that we were absolutely in each other's pockets.
Speaker 3:They saw us as an extension of themselves. They came to us when they needed something, whether it was help with a customer or going out to sales opportunity, etc. I think that was a a really, really smart thing that we did. Funny enough, worked it then outgrew the office and moved. So well, we moved and moved to the same building down the road and then they moved to, not the current one, the one before that. We couldn't get into the same office but we moved around the corner. So again, just being really close to Workday I think was beneficial.
Speaker 2:The other thing.
Speaker 3:it was probably that homeworking just allowing people to work from home, trusting them as grown ups, as adults, that you've got this work to do. We're not going to micromanage you. You know what you need to do. You've got to deliver it to your customers. You're as passionate as we are is actually delivering it to your customers, giving them that trust and that ownership to do that themselves. And the important thing was, well, not only financial, meaning that we didn't need a big office to put everyone in, but it meant we could hire people from wherever they lived, you know, people up in Newcastle or York or Scotland, whatever that they otherwise wouldn't have been with us because they wouldn't have wanted to travel down to.
Speaker 2:London, Very very smart.
Speaker 3:So those are probably the two things. Yeah, what?
Speaker 2:about you? What were your two things that's right in the locker.
Speaker 2:I don't know when we started in 2015,. The business was called Focus ERP right on day one and we did Oracleacle, sap and workday yeah, and those are the three areas. Um, after the first year, 75 to 80 percent of our revenues is coming from workday, but we had a huge, huge sap client, so we made one placement in the first year on Oracle. All the rest was SAP and the lion's share was Workday. And I think one key decision that has served us well until this day as well was there's actually two now it's out of the locker now. Thank you very much for that. Now it's out of the locker now. Thank you very much for that one.
Speaker 2:One day I just looked at our business and I know whether Ryan remembers this right because he was around in these days I looked at our business and I just went there's nothing special about this. This is in the first year, and after a torrid first four months as well, where I was 200 quid away from going bankrupt. So you know, and I had my house on the line, so you can imagine those conversations coming back home and talking to your wife and she's asking are we going to lose our house? And I'm like, yeah, we might, and you kind of think I shouldn't have done this. I really shouldn't have done this. I really shouldn't have done this. I should have just stayed where I was.
Speaker 2:All those conversations go on your head and after the first year, we'd made a really strong profit for a business in their first year and I thought I've got to change it. And he was doing this and I thought to myself this is going to work, right, all the conversations that we've had and I thought I've got to drop those two. I've got to drop Oracle. Oracle was, you know, not that we didn't try to do some Oracle business, but we just didn't pick up any sizable Oracle business because our workday business was so strong and our SAP business was very, very strong with a couple of clients. And I thought to myself you know what I'm going to do.
Speaker 2:I'm going to become the first dedicated workday recruitment company because no one else was doing it at the time and I think the team was probably no more than 10 at that point no more than 10. I'll probably say six if that. And the team I remember looked at me as though I was nuts. We had significant revenue coming from SAP and it was growing. And all of a sudden, the guy who owns the company is turning around and saying we're dropping this and we're dropping this. By the way, we're doing this properly as well. So we're not just not doing it, we are actually going to our customers, phoning our customers up, and saying I'm really sorry, but we don't do SAP no more. I did that properly and we went 100% workday. So that was probably decision one.
Speaker 2:If we hadn't have done that, maybe our growth curve had slowed. I was worried about that Because that was brave. It was really brave. Why would you want to drop a business that's making lots of money? But I thought we've just got to do it because we've got to be special, right, we've got to stick out in some way.
Speaker 2:And the second one was the name. So at that point I changed the name and we were going 100% Workday and I thought, well, I'll just call the company Focus on Workday. And I remember actually saying to Ryan let's call it Focus on Workday. And we went ahead and was about to make the change and then I thought to myself workday is probably what? 2,500 global customers in 2016, something like that. At some point we're going to get to a stage where our customers are going to say to us but you're doing such a great job in Workday, but actually we're implementing SAP for finance, or we're implementing SAP for supply supply chain, or we're implementing Oracle or we're implementing Salesforce. And if I call the company Focus on Workday, I can't really do those things. Do you know what I mean? You can't recruit SAP skills if you call it Focus on Workday, right. So I thought I need to call it Focus Cloud. So if I call it Focus Cloud, then that would allow us to branch out into any cloud markets that we want to.
Speaker 2:And I think those two decisions early on were what caused our increase in revenue and double and triple digit increase in revenue. The other one you said two, there's three and this is a funny one, right, you're gonna, you're gonna laugh at this was in covid. So so pre-covid, we're about, say, 20 people 2019, right, and we are. I don't know how many people did we place with you in, let's say, 2018, 2019? It was tens of people, wasn't it? Probably 30, 35 people in one year, maybe something like that Probably over that period.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're doing super, super well, right. And then I start thinking to myself now is the time that we need to diversify technology. So was pre-covid, but running up to it and our customers were really it was our customers that really drove that decision. So our customers were saying you guys are doing actually it was a light, it was a light. It was a light that was saying because we started doing business with um a light in the us and we placed 45 50 people with them in the us in one year. We did so well and a lot of our customers had feedback. You guys are amazing, you're doing a great job, but can you help us with some Salesforce stuff? Can you help us with SAP? And I thought we can't because we're only workday Now, let's diversify. So we diversified then in probably a week into COVID. So it's perfect timing on my part. No 5Ps conversation, please. There was no planning with it. There really wasn't. It was right. Next week we're going to launch an SAP business. We've got these SAP customers that want to do business with us. Let to launch an SAP business. We've got these SAP customers that want to do business with us. Let's launch an SAP business. It was really simple. It was that the.
Speaker 2:The third decision was that. Do you remember when the market fell out pre-COVID, like at the start of COVID and for me it was a, it was a really challenging time. My father died of COVID as well in April and I promised my dad that we would do something great with this business, right, and then he left us and everyone was working from home and we as a business, we just we weren't growing. Man, you know, the truth is we wasn't growing in the early COVID days. We just we just bumbled along and everyone had that fear which in the first five years of this business, we had no fear. You know, it was just. You know, it was just all hands upon.
Speaker 2:And one night and one night in June, I'm sitting at home and I'm thinking to myself this is not what I promised everyone. I never promised my dad that we would be working from home on team schools and being fearful about the market and not doing things we really want to do and all these types of things. It's certainly not what I promised everyone. So do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go for it.
Speaker 2:And that was it literally was a split decision one night and then the following morning I called this meeting and I had seven or eight guys on this team's call and I said to the guys we've got X amount of money in the bank and all of our competitors are making redundancies. Most other recruitment companies are letting people go. But this is not what I promised my dad and this is not what I promised you guys. We're going to 100%. Go for it now, guys, and everyone went oh yeah, we're gonna hire as many recruiters we possibly can and, by the way, we're also gonna move office. We're gonna move an office to double the size in London. Wasn't even in the office, but I just knew I had to do something to for the guys to go.
Speaker 2:he's serious about this and that's what we what we did in the next sort of four to eight weeks. We hired a lot of people. Do you know what? Since that third decision, we grew 400% in COVID. And I just think back, if I continued being fearful as I was I was being fearful, I had personal issues. The company wasn't growing, we were still making money, but we just wasn't growing at any pace. And that would be the third decision, I would say would be the critical one. If we hadn't have done that, we wouldn't be here today.
Speaker 3:Take some kahumas to do that. Yeah, after I made this decision.
Speaker 2:I was thinking I really hope that's the right call. We've got some good people coming to the business. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it worked.
Speaker 3:When you talked about the name Focus on Workday, I thought you were going to say we didn't do it because we had a Workday lawyer ring up and told us we can't.
Speaker 2:No, we decided not to do it because we knew that it would segregate us only to the Workday ecosystem, which is nothing wrong with that. But as a recruitment company, you want to be able to diversify at points and help customers in other areas. So our Workday business is now called Focus on WD, because, yeah, we didn't call it Focus on Workday, because I don't want that call from Workday lawyers.
Speaker 2:Very deep pockets Okay so you then leave Alight. What was it like the moment? Because you'd done this business for such a long time and I know it transitioned twice over that period of time as well and your role had changed.
Speaker 3:But the day, the first day, you wake up and you don't have to go to work, that day yeah, interesting and again, I talk about the time period because it was peak, covid, um, I didn't really see anyone. We had a, a team's call kind of leave and do, which was. It was great, but you know, it wasn't the get everyone together and, you know, sit in a bar all night long. I think I'd have been a blubbering wreck if I'd have done that.
Speaker 3:So, um, it was a it was a really weird sense of of time. Um, a couple of things happened. I fell off a bike. I really badly injured my shoulder so I couldn't do anything, so it was just a weird period. I was kind of at home for the first time in, you know, with nothing to do, first time for a long time, so I couldn't do anything. So it was just a weird period. I was kind of at home for the first time in with nothing to do first time for a long time.
Speaker 3:So I did lots of admin sorting stuff out, cleaning the office but very limited into what I could do. So it was just a weird, weird time. Also, I thought, right, I need to go and do something, but I don't really know what it was. So I started just applying for a couple of jobs, doing stuff, trying a few things. People reached out on LinkedIn and so I had some conversations. So it was just a kind of time to reflect on what's gonna be next for me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that was quite nice actually to have the time to do that and the focus to do that.
Speaker 2:But the next role after that was not going to be Workday right, Correct. So you were looking for like a kind of respite from the Workday ecosystem for a while.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. I took a couple of roles actually. So I took a commercial role with a small tech company totally different, nothing to do with SaaS technology, nothing to do with anything that I was familiar or comfortable with and that was interesting because it was a completely different world, so it was learning from scratch. But I did that sort of part-time. And then I was doing some kind of non-exec strategic advisory type roles as well, which is really good because it was just different. It was thinking about things using the stuff that I'd learned around sales and people and, and you know, partnerships, etc. But helping other businesses kind of do things. So, totally different, but great, really really interesting year I think it was about 12 months.
Speaker 2:I did that yeah, I, I remember when you told us what you was doing, we was all a bit like wow, okay, okay, different. And then there was a small stint with another work department.
Speaker 3:Correct. Yeah, so again I did some advisory work for CloudRock. I've known Minos very well, known him for years, and just helped him out with some bits and pieces and that was good and actually I think that was kind of a I miss this world. I know it well, I know the people. It's comfortable. So I think, that was almost a stepping stone to say, right, well, yeah, maybe now is the time to seriously start thinking about doing something similar that I'd done before. Okay, so yeah.
Speaker 2:And then the transition to ending up where you are now, to advisors. How did that all come about?
Speaker 3:Well, so interesting story, it was a phone call from one of the advisors' partners, so just quick jump back in time. So the advisors' partners pretty much all came from either Aon or the Omnipoint business that I'd spoken about before, so I knew them really well. So they called me up and they said look, we've got some investments in private equity and part of the deal is that we expand globally. We're thinking about coming to the UK and having a footprint in Europe and it was a bit of a dance around.
Speaker 3:Okay, you think you're doing this, and they were saying, yeah, do you know anyone who might be interested?
Speaker 2:And I was thinking they called you yeah, so it was a bit of a dancer who's built a business from scratch.
Speaker 3:You know, in the UK has made it really successful and uh, yeah, that's what we're looking for, just in case you know anyone exactly yeah, um and at the same time they spoke to Matt Smith, who obviously I know well and love the bits, and he he kind of he and I sat down and again there was beer involved and we said should we do it? We said, yeah, absolutely. If we do it, here's what we want to do. We want to do it in this way. We want to bring these people on board and went back to the partners and said, look, yeah, we're keen, but this is what we want to do and that's exactly what we've done. So we've got a team on board.
Speaker 3:We've just started from not necessarily from scratch and it's been very, very different the journey this time, because we're 300 people in North America, we're a $50 million business over there. So it's been easy to say, right, well, we can do it and we can recruit people, there's work in North America, bring people on board, we'll actually sub them to those projects. Meanwhile, we can build the team up, start selling directly here. So it's been a really, really different journey. It's probably been.
Speaker 3:We've done in two years what probably took us five in the cloud period, just in terms of where we are today, not necessarily in numbers because we're less people here and we're still 50 people today, but because we've got people here, I mean we're still 50 people today, but because we've got the North American practice we can utilise if we need skills, yeah, and obviously you've got the projects in the North American region.
Speaker 2:So when you bring on, those absolute superstars that I've seen you hiring. Then you've got work for them in other regions.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. It was so low risk because it was a case of just hire the best men. The partners said just hire the best people, don't worry about utilisation, don't worry about work, we'll fill them up with that, giving you the chance to go and sell locally and relationships with work there in the UK, etc. Which is exactly what we've done, and now we are pretty much self-sufficient. We've got our own customers here. We've got seven phase one projects that we're working at the moment. We've got a number of AMS customers as well, and we're still subbing to the US projects, so we're very busy, which is great.
Speaker 2:Is there an element of your work now where you think back constantly to what you did in the early days of cloud and what you could have done better?
Speaker 3:Yeah, not necessarily thinking that, and I think we did really well considering where we were in the market and all that kind of stuff. There are some things. You look back and think shit, I wish I'd known that then, that I know today. But that's just life, isn't it?
Speaker 2:You just kind of figure those things out. It's this transition of someone who's running a business right. You can always do things. Don't ask me the mistakes.
Speaker 3:How long you got.
Speaker 2:But the mistakes are important right.
Speaker 3:The mistakes are what you learn. Okay, that didn't work. Maybe it nearly cost us a business, or just cost us a project or whatever. So you know not to do that again and you try a different approach. That's what helps grow things and achieve different aims in the future.
Speaker 2:So at what point did you know that you were going to come back into Workday before you did, and were there any other interested parties at the same time?
Speaker 3:I think, like I I said I was starting to get the itch and say, right, okay, it's, it's time to go back to what I know. And I got the phone call from, from the US partners and at that point I thought, yeah, this is it, this is absolutely it there weren't interested parties. But I was starting to put some feelers out so probably would have started having some conversations if I hadn't gone down the advisor's route. But just very happy I did. It's been great so far. Really good business.
Speaker 2:Really really good business and you've built your UK team very strategically. I'd like to say Absolutely.
Speaker 3:We've gone for the best people in every possible role, and then we're building teams underneath them. We've got the graduates coming on board, who are just incredibly smart and bring a completely different perspective, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2:How long did it take to really launch that UK function? I know you had the security of the US with their projects and stuff, but to really say that you've got a sustainable business in the UK and the MIA, how long did it take?
Speaker 3:It's probably about 12 months. I think, again, it was about getting some key people on board. So in the first 12 months we hired two salespeople, two sales directors, Tim and Matthew, who, I think, for me, that was the moment I was like right, okay, we are now going to make our own destiny, we're going to go out and do our own business. Me, that was the moment.
Speaker 3:I was like, right, okay, we are now gonna make our own destiny, we're gonna go out and do our own business. So that was probably the point that right, we're not just hiring people to sub to the US, we're hiring people to build this business here to be self-sufficient, sustainable. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right. So, matt, you've built a number of successful teams over your career. Is there a particular philosophy that you have specifically around building? Let's say, building teams in general, not only building successful workday teams?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think, it's something which, well, at the moment, matt Smith and I are very aligned on. In terms of getting the right people into the businesses is critical. I think if you, looking at what we do work day we can teach work, that there's great training courses of work they provide. We've got fantastic people who can teach people the technical, functional project management skills around workday itself and around projects, so that side is almost taken care of. So what we look for when we recruit and building teams is, it's quite simple stuff hiring some nice people that share our values. I think that is key. What are those key values?
Speaker 3:Key values is about trust and empowerment. It's about, you know, letting people, as we talked earlier, letting people have the ability to go and do their job and think for themselves. We want people that we can trust. In a crisis, I think that's quite key as well, because projects all our projects go exceedingly well and there's never any problems there might be at one time. So we want people that we can trust. We want people that can. If you're in the trenches together, you know they've got your back, you know they're there Really important Driving forwards.
Speaker 3:We've all got to do this one thing, which is get this customer live with a workday platform on this particular date and there's stuff happening, there's things going left field, there's stuff going wrong. We want people that will just drive towards that and be very calm and get to that end point. I think it is important as well to have different types of people on teams. You know, if I went and hired 10 people like me, then probably very good at doing certain things but not so good at other things. So it's about having different personalities. It's about having people who are, you know again, don't get stressed under pressure, but sometimes you want people who do get a little bit stressed and have that sense of urgency. So putting those people together on a project is quite key.
Speaker 3:So it's about finding the people that work well together is really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when people, you can see people get stressed when they're under pressure. You can see people get stressed when they're under pressure. For me, it's something that I don't want to see people stressed, but I don't mind seeing it if that makes sense, because I know they care, Someone who doesn't get stressed when they're really under it. You kind of question whether well, do you care? Because I care. Yeah, you know I want to see blood. You've got to see blood, sweat and tears at some point.
Speaker 3:So a bit of stress isn't a bad thing. It helps to focus. I mean there's a chemical thing going on in your brain when you get stressed. That means you can focus and you can do things. So stress isn't a bad thing. If people get stressed over the slightest tiny thing, that's a problem. It's got to be the stress for the right thing. And stress that they can then control and drive towards the goal as well, if they're just stressed and running around with their hands in the air, then that's no good to anyone.
Speaker 2:Tell me about a time when you've been particularly stressed. Tell me about a time when you were stressed in in cloud, and then tell me about a time in a light, because there are different stresses, without a doubt so I think the stresses in cloud were probably always because of those early days.
Speaker 3:When it is a case of right, we are absolutely up against it. If we don't get this invoice paid tomorrow, we can't pay the salaries. Then these are people that rely on us for that. They put their own mortgages and things to pay. So stress is probably all related to those early financial days and quite a few of those there weren't a few of them, but there were enough to remember.
Speaker 3:And I think it's hard because you think, okay, well, we've got to keep enough cash back in the business, but then you've got to grow the business and you've got to recruit people and start driving the business forward, so you can't just keep money in the bank for it when you're growing a business. There was a period as well in those cloud days when we actually got sued by a French customer, which I won't go into details, but that was quite a stressful period. The only saving grace to that was it was just before we got acquired by Aon, so we obviously had to declare it as part of the due diligence. But then it was a case of right now we've got some very big, scary lawyers. They can deal with this kind of stuff, and they did and made that problem go away. Had we still been cloud, that would have been quite a horrific experience really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what sort of also have impacted that have? On you because you're, you know you're, you're one of the share line shareholders and that's, that's an interesting one that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was, and I mean I'll tell you another time when we're having a coffee together. But yeah, it was a very stressful period and you know I'm someone who doesn't get stressed I'm normally very, very calm but that period itself was just a difficult and it was. It was. It was a stupid, ridiculous situation. We weren't actually in contract with them. We'd walked away under workday's advice, but under French law, the fact you were negotiating a contract was as good as signing it, so therefore we'd broken a contract.
Speaker 3:So you learn a lot of things in business that you don't necessarily expect to know. So yeah, I think again, timing was just incredible that had we not done the sale to Aon and then had the support from their legal team, it would have fallen on us, it would have been very expensive, et cetera. So that was a stressful period.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I guess the whole contract. We don't want to go too much into it, but the whole contract was probably under French law as well.
Speaker 3:Correct. Yeah, All right. Okay, We'd set the business up in France, we'd set an office, we'd hired some people, because we saw France as being the next big thing for Workday. And again it's like well, that's all going to get completely pulled away from us just from this one issue, which had, frankly, blown out of all proportions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, and then moving to Alight.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't remember anything being particularly stressful. I mean, it was the usual stuff of you know, there were quarterly numbers to achieve, there were yearly numbers to achieve. It was that kind of stress. It was just the case of, okay, right, well, you know, we have to win this particular project to make the quarter number and if we don't win it, then how the hell are we going to get around it. So it was that kind of stuff, just general kind of run-of-the-mill stuff. That was stressful.
Speaker 2:Different type.
Speaker 3:Yeah, different type of stress, it wasn't my money on the table, but ultimately I was responsible for that number, so you could get sacked if you don't achieve it.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, you've been involved in the cloud ecosystem for a long, long time now. What sort of future predictions do you have for the cloud markets? And also, what do you think? Tell me what you think about AI.
Speaker 3:AI. Everything these days has to have AI in the conversation. They do, I think, from again. Just looking at purely through my Workday lens, as I do with most things, I think Workday is just going to keep getting bigger and better. I mean Workday are acquiring businesses that you know fill gaps in their own, some great acquisitions recently.
Speaker 3:Fantastic acquisitions, absolutely fantastic. So I think we'll see a lot more of that, and this is across all the different cloud applications as well, as well as building out functionality. I mean, workday is great in terms of customer has a requirement, so they put a brainstorm on and other customers vote on it. Then you see that down the line, you see that particular feature, function area, the system being built out so again I can only see work. They're getting richer and broader and covering more of the spectrum of what's required.
Speaker 3:AI is absolutely going to be critical to that. I do have a kind of wry smile when anyone says AI.
Speaker 2:these days it's like you get a toaster it's just AI, it's just everything you can think.
Speaker 3:I think AI isn't always intelligent in the way that the people touted us, but I think there's some fascinating things around machine learning and, just you know, it's all about data for me and it's about cloud. Systems have an access to so much data. How can we channel it? How can we do more with that data and understand and predict what people are going to do in business? So you know, I've done this, this and this. What is the next logical step I are going to do in business?
Speaker 3:So, you know I've done this, this and this. What is the next logical step I'm going to take? Well, using all this data, there's a 97% likelihood you're going to do this. There's still a 3% chance you're going to go and do something completely different. So that to me isn't artificial intelligence, it's just being smart with data, yeah, but I think the true AI stuff, the true AI of actually being that intelligence, of taking the data and predicting and analyzing it, understanding it, I think it's going to be phenomenal, absolutely fascinating. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:I was in the event the other day and the individuals I was with actually from work day and they were saying that that it's been. It's been there for 10 years already and just because everyone in the last couple of years has started to talk about it, we almost think it's a new thing, that Workday has implemented and it's not. It's already been there. It has.
Speaker 3:I think that again the Workday model, the way they've built the system is just ability to take this data on board and to understand it and learn from it, etc. So yeah, workday have been very very good, they've been at the forefront of it. But, I think there's a lot more out there that you know where Workday start linking to ChatGBT and some of those other systems, and just the power when you start building that into something like a workday business system is just unknowable what's going to happen in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's exciting, it is Very exciting, yeah, very much, especially with the advance in finance as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's hope that's implemented. Yeah, all right, okay. And then, last of all, advice All right, okay. And then, last of all, what advice would you give a young person looking to enter the, let's say, the Workday ecosystem? Now, I'd say, don't do it, because I don't want competition.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's great and that's a very tongue-in-cheek comment, because I do I love giving advice out to people. I think it's fantastic when people come up and want to do something a bit different. I think the advice is very different to when we started the business. You know everything has moved on significantly. I think what I would say to them is just try and pick an area. Pick an area to get very good at, become a niche. You know, whether it is prison or it's the adaptive planning or AI type areas. Find something you can get very, very good at and specialist in, because all the systems out there are so broad, they're so vast.
Speaker 3:Now they're trying to do everything yeah you're not going to do everything very well, but if you can focus on one area and become the experts in that, the go-to partner, then you'll be setting yourselves up for success it doesn't mean you always focus on that area and you know, like you said, with your business you can then branch out and do the next area and the next area, but become really good in these kind of pillars of expertise yeah, I don't think there's anyone who's branched out really in those, in those offshoots yet of workday.
Speaker 2:I think that's we're about to see that I believe probably maybe because the offshoots themselves aren't big enough.
Speaker 3:So you know, maybe after starting out you could become a PECON expert, for example, or something like that but, you know to be a workday potential player, then I think you've got to have an area that's going to be big enough to keep yourself fed and watered yeah.
Speaker 2:Matt. That's. This is absolutely being. It's been great to have you here. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming.
Speaker 3:Thank you, always a pleasure. It's been great. Thank you for the chat.