Griffin Managing Director Philip Grannum outlines the firm's next strategic moves and reveals how 15 years experience in comms will help him turn an ambitious strategy into a successful outcome.
Grannum transitioned into telecoms about 15 years ago when he moved from Xerox to AT&T before joining telecoms start-up Energis, a pioneer of the reseller model. Having led the growth of data services and Internet through partners such as Star, Pipex, Freeserve and Demon, Energis was then acquired by Cable&Wireless, and having risen through the ranks Grannum's last role was the CEO of THUS (which also included Demon). "I am excited about the rapid pace of change within communications," he explained. "I still remember the first email I sent while at Xerox. At the time this was remarkable and I wanted to be part of this revolution."
He was attracted to Griffin because of its 100 per cent focus on channel partners. "Griffin has eight carriers fully integrated and has the purchasing power that enables our partners to receive competitive commercial terms," he said. "Griffin's end-to-end management portal, MATRIX, provides a single inventory set enabling all functions within Griffin and our partners to have complete visibility of their inventory, from quote through to order, provisioning, service assurance and right the way through to billing. This has taken years of development and is absolutely fundamental to provide our partners and their customers with high levels of service."
Griffin has recently been acquired by MDNX, and having lived through many network acquisitions previously, Grannum is fully aware of the pitfalls of not integrating the core business functions and networking infrastructure. "When I left Cable&Wireless it still had three different networks - Green, Blue and Tartan, all with different management platforms and different products enabled on them," he explained. "Therefore, my key priority was to ensure that the core systems, processes and networks were fully integrated. The hardest part was decommissioning the old Griffin Portal, MOPS, and transferring all partners and business functions to MATRIX."
The downside of integrating functions quickly is that there can be a dip in the service experience as employees need to learn new systems and processes. "My current priority is to ensure that this is achieved as quickly as possible and that Griffin provides all partners with the highest service experience," added Grannum. "The other area of focus is product development. Assured Voice has already been launched enabling our partners to choose from eight different hosted voice platforms. These are pre-connected to our network and using real-time QOS enables our data lines to carry voice at the highest possible quality. Our partners don't get locked-in with a single voice provider and can easily move to take advantage of better commercial terms or new technologies."
The culture that Grannum aims to instil is one based on trust. "To gain trust, everyone needs to take ownership and be accountable for their actions," he said. "This helps to ensure that any issues are resolved at the first point of contact - no more getting passed from pillar to post. It also means being open and transparent with our partners. We already provide call waiting stats to our partners and are now publishing all carrier delivery lead times, not their SLA but their actual delivery times which will be updated monthly.
"The other cultural trait that I am instilling is ambition, encouraging people who consistently push themselves and want to achieve the very best, people who in their own way want to 'scratch the sky' to achieve the impossible and leave their mark on this world. Within sales, I want the people who aim for 1,000 per cent and keep pushing until they get there. This requires people who are prepared to take risks and who are prepared to fail and have the right spirit and self-motivation to dust themselves off and get back in the ring with greater knowledge and experience."
Being an organisation that is easy to do business with remains a key priority. Going forward, new products and services will be added to the portfolio including cloud-based applications and infrastructure, unified communications and IP voice services. "Providing these services will add enormous value to our partners, but only if the whole end-to-end experience is a positive one," he added. "This requires self-service portals, service/application automation and the best technical people to prevent issue from occurring and fix them if they do. This is my mid-term objective, to enable our partners to provide a deeper and more profitable service offer to their customers.
"Griffin will remain totally focused on providing IP services exclusively to resellers. In five years time, data networking and IP services will remain very much in demand. I'm convinced that cloud-based applications will be the norm and Griffin will evolve to meet this demand so that our partners receive the right balance of innovation, price and service."
The majority of Griffin's partners have been purely focused on the commercial sector but Griffin will enable them to double their addressable market by opening up the Public Sector, claimed Grannum. "The Public Sector represents a huge growth opportunity for our partners," he explained. "Historically it has been the preserve of the big players like BT and Cable&Wireless, but this legacy is now changing. Getting on the PSN framework is a daunting task as well as an expensive one and I am working on a programme to change this, simplifying the steps required that will enable our partners to effectively compete and win in the Public Sector."
Technology continues to evolve and customers are often unaware of what is available and more importantly how technology can enable their organisation to grow. "Organisations want to work with resellers who take the time to understand their business and provide solutions that improve their bottom line," noted Grannum. "To fully exploit the market potential sales people need to be proactive and add real value to their customers. This requires them to have a good understanding of the technology and take a consultative approach. Sales people too often pitch to their customers rather than listen to them. To be successful, sales people must ask lots of questions, listen to the response and crucially act on this information."
Success is often born out of failure, noted Grannum. "To me, my biggest failure was when I was at Energis leading the bid for Centrica's virtual contact centre for about 10,000 agents," he recalled. "I put my heart and soul into this bid but came second to Cable&Wireless. Their CIO called me to tell me the news, and I literally fell to the floor. This was an all-time career low point for me where I started to doubt myself and my ability.
"Soon after this, Centrica went out to tender for their inbound services, which at the time included the AA and Onetel and was worth much more than the previous contract. Having the previous failure in my mind gave me more determination than ever to win this opportunity and I gave it absolutely everything and eventually won the contract. The biggest contract award that Energis had ever been awarded. I often think back to this situation and take strength from it, reliving the phone call when I was told that we had come second really helps drive me and do everything possible to ensure that this doesn't happen again."•