Dominic O’Hanlon - CEO, rhipe
One of the challenges I’ve faced over this year is saying no to people and to vendors, and to countries. If everybody wants you to do everything, then you are not going to succeed at anything. You can’t execute – you are spread too thin.
Have there been any major surprises over the year?
When I joined the business I was really surprised at the depth of the relationships the company had with the big vendors and customers. Historically, I’d look at it and say, ‘who’s our biggest threat and our biggest competitor?’
But I haven’t been focused on that at all. So the biggest surprise to me is it hasn’t been a business where I’ve had to spend a lot of my time focused on the competitive threat.
It has been much more focused on doing what we do, and doing it well, and making sure we’re doing everything that we can to give value to our partners.
What is your leadership style?
I have a very good team so my leadership style is to surround myself with really good people and let them fail and learn. I do the same. I’m not afraid of experimentation.
I’m not afraid of doing new things, put an organisational structure in place, and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, then change it. I have a really good team of people around me that are doing lots of new things, and we are learning as we go and we make mistakes.
I have always been the sort of person that likes to be friends with the team, but by the same token you have to run a business and not everyone is going to be happy with the decisions you make and you can’t be the person who keeps changing our mind because someone is unhappy with it.
You have to have leadership and say, ‘we are taking that hill and if you want to follow, great, but if you don’t I will find somebody else who will.’ There is a real balance there.
What excites you about the IT industry at the moment?
Some of our partners, who are our customers (service providers), are now becoming vendors and are asking us to distribute their products for them. The term is known as frenemies or co-opetition.
But what’s happening is we are getting multiple vendors that used to be direct competitors in a room together with us, talking about how we go to market together.
We are getting partners, who we used to provide Microsoft licensing to, coming to us and saying, ‘we’ve built this product, which co-exists with Office 365, can you distribute it for us?’
And so you have this whole dynamic of the Cloud changes so many things because the barriers to entry are being greatly reduced. What that will mean is there are more service providers coming, there will be more products coming to market, and there will be more value-added offerings.
What is your vision for the company for the next three years?
I want to continue to grow the business. I don’t see any reason why we should back off the accelerator. Of course, there’s always a challenge in terms of execution.
If you grow a business by 40 per cent from one million to 1.4, that’s quite different than growing from 100 million to 140 million. It means you have to have the right people and the processes and the structures, and the disciplines and billing.
We processed 26,000 orders last year so there’s a lot of scale that has to happen in the backend to help you deliver.
The vision for the next three years is to continue that growth, but whereas we previously got all of our growth out of on-premise or hosted, it is now public Cloud, and hybrid Cloud, which will be driving the fastest parts of our growth.
What do you love about your current role?
For me, what I love about this business is we can actually make material changes here. There aren’t 16 levels of corporate approval before you can make a slight change to something in the business.
People can walk into my office and say, ‘I want to build this new practice to do X and hire five people to do it and here’s the business case,’ and we’ll sit down and look at it and if it makes sense we will do it.
And so it is quite an agile business. Everyone is very motivated. It is exciting. We are in a really unique position in the marketplace. I am very proud of the fact that we are the only company that is 100 per cent focused on subscription and driving consumption.
This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of ARN magazine.
