Calyx CEO Steve Clark is growing his company culture with the sublime dedication of a scientist because for him, culture is everything.
Success is down to having the right people in the right roles and to say that Clark has prioritised his staffing strategy would be to greatly understate the nature of his belief in people power. "The most significant strategic work we have undertaken this year has been to rebuild our leadership team," he explained. "It's been my primary focus and, with the appointment of Terry Williamson as our Sales and Marketing Director in September, that work is now complete. 2014 is going to be a great year for us."
Having completed the leadership line-up a current pain point is recruiting the right people elsewhere in the business. "There is simply nothing more important for the company at the moment than ensuring we have people who are engaged, motivated and fully focused on our customers," stated Clark. "We want our business to be renowned for the quality of its people. We want customers and channel partners to choose to work with us because they'll have a first class experience. Not just because we have effective systems and processes that make it easy to do business with us, but because they feel that we, as a company and as individuals, are engaged with them, understand their problems and can help to solve them. Culture is everything.
"People come to work and spend on average eight hours a day at their desks, five days a week. That is a significant investment of their lives into our business, so as a business we have a real responsibility to make that investment work for them. The best way we can do that is through developing the right culture, one where people feel valued, where they feel empowered in their job and where they feel engaged with the company. This is what we are doing at Calyx and, if you can get this right, you'll have a workforce that is enthused, motivated and believe me, customers pick up on that in seconds, and they'll want to do business with you because of it."
Clark got into comms more by luck than design. After leaving the forces he worked as a consultant before joining Everlogic as a project manager. "I moved up the ranks via sales to become Technical Director before the company was sold to Azzurri in March 2004," he explained. "I stayed with Azzurri and again worked my way through the ranks, first becoming Technical Services Director where I was responsible for the integration of 16 companies into the Azzurri fold. I left in June 2012 by which time I was responsible for the whole of Operations with a team of over 500 people."
According to Clark, the real success here wasn't integrating the different systems and processes, it was integrating all the individual values of those companies into a single, cohesive culture that created a 'fantastic environment' in which to work. "We really succeeded with that," added Clark. "It was a great place to work and we had a happy, proactive workforce of which I was deeply proud to be a part."
Winding back further in time, Calyx Managed Services was established by Ian Smith and known as Matrix Communications, which was sold to Calyx , then an Irish-based organisation in 2006. The UK arm was subsequently bought by Better Capital in 2010. Since then, noted Clark, the metamorphosis of telephony into a software application has had a dramatic impact on the sector. "Traditional comms businesses and IT resellers are now in direct competition with each other and as we move into a world of software defined networks and the software defined data centre we must consider that there will be many new entrants into the marketplace," he added.
"We've seen so many mergers and acquisitions over the past 12 months as businesses scramble bring different types of expertise in house. Our approach has been to work closely with selected vendors such as Brocade and Juniper. We are able to leverage their expertise as well as our own for the benefit of our customers."
Clark does not under estimate the power of effective vendor relationships and counts obstacles to thriving partnerships, such as excessive complexity, as an industry bugbear. "Pricing models in particular can be exceedingly over complicated, it just creates barriers to doing business," he stated. "And it wastes time. Indecision from vendors can also be frustrating, especially when go-to-market strategies are inconsistent. This can reflect badly on the channel. I'd like to see better control over channel pricing and accreditations from the vendors. They really need to take ownership of this."•