One Week In

I made a promise to myself to update this blog each week so apologies that I'm a few days late this week. In my defence I'll blame the pile of work that hit my desk after we completed our acquisition with Insight along with a bout of man flu!

In my last entry I talked about the decision we took as a management team to integrate the business with Insight to help accelerate growth plans and leverage some unique opportunities presented by our individual business models. One week in is probably a good time to write about how things have been going and our outline plans for the future.

Anyone who has gone through this kind of exercise will tell you that it is pretty gruelling. Essentially you need to do a hectic day job and take on a pile of additional integration work. On top of all this you also need to spend a lot of time with your people, partners and clients to ensure they both understand what is going on and feel an active part of it.

The reaction from our people has been fantastic, this deal makes an awful lot of sense and they are really fired up by the benefits of being part of a hugely successful global and agile business along with the opportunities now ahead of us.

Our partners are also equally excited by the changes. They see the potential for a much broader and more interesting relationship. The reaction from within Cisco has been incredible at all levels. We recently sat down to review our unique shared services partnership with Cisco and it was probably one of the most constructive meetings we have had to date. MINX is now seen as a major business partner and our working relationship is becoming closer and more collaborative.

We have invested a lot of care and attention in explaining the additional benefits that the change to our company will bring to our clients. Without exception they understand and fully support the changes. We will continue to focus on understanding our clients businesses and in delivering exceptionally high quality solutions to their requirements. In addition we will start to provide a deeper and a broader range of services and cover more geographies. It’s all upside!

I guess you could say that the future is bright, the future is Orange ;-)

Thowing a curved ball (Insight acquires MINX)

I was stuck in a garage getting a pair of rather well worn front tyres replaced just before we completed the acquisition of MINX by Insight. John was keeping me updated on progress re the paperwork via phone and it gave me a bit of time to reflect on my time with MINX and future plans.

I joined the company just over a year ago to work with a bunch of very smart people led by a highly charismatic and talented MD. My original role title was 'Technical Director' which was great for the ego but was not how I wanted us to shape this part of the business hence the change to Client Services Director the same week!

We have created a fantastic services focused business. Our Customer Sat scores are consistently running at 95% as scored by our clients and Cisco have us pegged at 'Customer Satisfaction Excellence'. Just as importantly we have great customer relationships. We don't just deliver stated requirements, we work hard to understand our clients business, drivers, aspirations and constraints. We then add in our own deep understanding of networking technologies and their best practical application to maximise ROI. We strive, wherever possible, to exceed our clients expectations!

I guess my favourite bit of customer feedback in recent weeks was from a City business that wanted to test the MINX 'hype' by getting us to run a major phone system upgrade. Having experienced a number issues to date with previous services partners they were prepared for the worst! The end of project summary read as follows: 'The only problem was.......there was no problem!' Decisions often have to be taken after we sign-off on requirements. Our project managers and highly experienced consultants work closely throughout the project with our clients to ensure that the right decisions are made and we deliver a great end result.

I'm incredibly proud of the close relationships we have built up with Cisco and our other trusted partners. All of who share our focus on integrity, quality and high customer satisfaction. It really has been a team effort that has helped us to differentiate MINX in a very competitive marketplace.

We have been able to attract some incredibly talented people to come work with us over the past few years. We recognise the long term benefits of investing in people and create fully funded and custom fit development programmes. MINX has a remarkably flat company structure and we are all held responsible for maximising the quality of our end product . We also look after each other, at times people do drop the ball and it's important that we're all there to help out and turn any problems into a solution.

It was interesting to look at the many different reports of our decision to integrate MINX with Insight. They all seemed to simply repeat the standard communications that were issued. These communications are intended to satisfy the various legislative requirements around company reporting but it might be useful to share my personal perspective here.

Looking ahead we had a number of options on how we could grow the business. Over the past year our revenue and margins had been steadily increasing along with our client base. We could have continued to grow the business organically albeit with a very tough market very slowly for the next 12-18 months. Another option would be to throw a bit of a curved ball (hence the image to the left!).

We have had a close relationship with Insight for a long time and I guess you could even argue that we had been dry running this for a while before we considered formalising the arrangement. They have a fantastically successful business and are a lot of fun to work with. The logic behind our decision to integrate is absolutely brain dead simple, put a business with a large sales team and highly sophisticated operations back-end together with a business that works closely with its clients to create large complex programmes of change. The only question really is why didn't we do it much earlier!

Will we get lost in the bowels of a large corporate and lose the agility and client focus that has helped MINX become so successful? If we were simply merging two similar businesses that might have been a risk. Insight and MINX have great chemistry but are very different businesses, there is little if any overlap. Stuart Fenton the EMEA President and Angelo Di Ventura the UK MD are on exactly the same page as John, Clinton, Chris and myself. We're going to build on the existing model and dramatically accelerate our existing growth plans.

MINX was a great place to be last week and it is an even better place to be today!

A better way to work

In spring 2003, 17.7% of men and 26.7% of women were employed with flexible working arrangements in the United Kingdom, (Office for National Statistics 2003).

In 2003 the UK Government introduced legislation that gave parents of children under 6 or the parents of disabled children under 18, the right in law to request a flexible working arrangement from their employer. A survey in 2005 by the National Office of Statistics showed that 71% of female workers and 60% of male workers were aware of the rights created under the 2003 legislation. Between 2003 and 2005 more than 14% of all workers had requested a change to flexible working. From 6 April 2007 the law will extend the right to request flexible working to careers of adults.

For employers, flexible working can aid the recruitment and retention of staff. It can also help provide staff cover outside normal working hours and reduce the need for overtime. Additionally flexible working can also improve the provision of equal opportunities to staff unable to work standard hours.

Flexible working can give employees greater freedom to organize their working lives to suit personal needs. In addition, travelling can be cheaper and easier if it is out of peak time.

MINX Flexible Working

We support flexible working for a number of reasons:

• Improves the morale of our people and improves the quality of life for their families by providing them with greater control over travelling and work-life balance
• Removes excessive hours working culture driven by overtime, hence our people are less at risk from stress and accidents through fatigue
• Allows us to fully leverage and demonstrate to our clients that we ‘walk the talk’ by using collaborative and mobile worker technologies
• Reduces our overall carbon footprint by doing away with travel where not necessary. Where travel is required it can in many cases take place outside of peak hours which is a much nicer time to take a train!

Changing to flexible working means taking a very different approach to the way we measure productivity. Coming into the office at 9am and leaving at 5pm is a pretty poor way to control the amount of work we do. At MINX we look at the amount of time we can spend productively across a month and break it out into billable and non-billable activities. Our time management systems are web based hence people can log on and update their task information throughout the day and their managers can keep on top of work assignments, progress and ensure our people are not working excessive hours or are under-utilized.

It’s a much more effective way to get the most out of your work force and more closely reflects the way people want to work!