#Podcast episode 11 with Chris Loe is now out.
Chris is a Solution Architect with Slalom, and a diverse and fascinating career path behind him including a stint where he started his own consultancy.
We actually met years ago when he was the client where I implemented MS CRM… and I can even remember the date too!
It was 8.8.2008… when Beijing hosted the Olympics.
In fact, we were watching the opening ceremony whilst deploying to production!
Anyway, we had so much to talk about, and I especially loved teasing out the differences between #MicrosoftDynamicsCRM and #Salesforce as well as how his career path had been led primarily by curiosity.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation.
Enjoy!
#OnThePeiroll
Transcript
Pei Mun Lim
Hi, Chris, thank you for agreeing to come for the second time on on my podcast, OnThePeiroll. How are you today?
Chris
I’m good, thank you, if slightly sunburns, I’m on holiday at the moment. This is day one, I’ve already been in the sun for far too long. Come indoors to try and get away from it from it.
Pei Mun Lim
Well, you have a healthy shade of suntan if I might say. So. Thank you, again, the last time that we spoke,
Pei Mun Lim
we had some issues on internet site. So thank you again for joining me today. So looking at your history, if there are quite a long history in the consulting space, we met quite a long time ago. And as I mentioned to you, I can’t even remember the date because I did a project with with your company at that time. You were the client and I was with the partner who was implementing Microsoft CRM and you’ll go live date was on eighth of August 2008. And the reason why I can remember that was on go live date, China’s having its opening ceremony for the Olympics. So what I’d like from you is if you can tell us the story of how you got to where you are today you’re a solution owner at slalom. Yes. Can you just walk us through and tell us your story?
Chris
Wow. Okay, it’s a long story as well. I think the best way I find to describe my career is that I’ve been why called curiosity LED. So I fell into technology by accident I had tried to university, but it wasn’t for me. I dropped out early, kind of had the conversation with my parents. You know, if I was going to do university, I had to get a job. So I did a couple of different temping jobs, mainly admin type roles. quite boring stuff, if I’m honest. And then just by sheer chance, I got an admin role in a project office for a company that we’re building a brand new billing system for Northwest water, or united utilities, as they are now. So I worked in the project office doing some admin, but then kind of got a bit hands on. Essentially, I became a release manager over time. But he was at a time this is around the year 2000, when there was a huge shortage of technical skills, technology skills. So literally, we were almost dragging people off the streets, you know, if you could, if you could type, you get a job. And actually, funnily enough, some of the guys I work with, on the development team, were all being given sponsored night courses, how to be how to learn pro se, they were all x gasfitters. From from, from the from the utilities, companies themselves, they were kind of cross training, people who are in manual roles to take up technology roles. It’s such a shortage. So yeah, so So I took this job initially not not necessarily seeking technologies being my future. And essentially, I kind of just went from there. So I got kind of got trained on the job to be a release manager. Then I moved on to the help desk, was on the help desk for a bit kind of helping customers with issues. And I kind of outgrew that company at that point, I could see that company in particular was going to have some challenges around maintaining their business in the UK, they were an American software company. And I got a job as a tester next. And testing sounded fun, because it was a great way to learn. You know, you learn how a system works. And you also learn how software’s created, developed. So I did testing and then and then rather randomly, I got a phone call from it was a small, it was a small consulting company at the time, from the boss who said, Oh, we’ve got a project out in the US. We’ve won a tender to deliver a billing platform, it was SAP. And we need a project manager. And I don’t know, project management at that point. But there was a project, there was a program director in place, who was a great guy, really, really, really experienced. And there was a team of four of us I wasn’t kind of alone. And the next thing I knew I found myself on a plane to America, America to be gone project manager and sap implementation. So it all been kind of curiosity led a bit opportunity LED and a great time in technology. To be honest, that was how my career got started.
Pei Mun Lim
I like I really like that. You didn’t tell me about how you started last time. So you mentioned you found out University wasn’t for you. Can you just talk a little bit about that
experience?
Chris
Also, so I was actually going on a very different path. I was actually going down. It was a combined degree in media studies in business. But I’d I’d taken a B tech national diploma course prior to university. I didn’t do a levels I didn’t, I didn’t feel attracted to a levels, the B tech sounded in medium or interesting because it was much more hands on, it’s more vocational, a bit less academic. And what I found when I went from the from the B tech course to university was it was like it was winding the clock back two years. So stuff I’d been doing for two years at college level. At university level, we were actually starting from the beginning. So it felt almost like a backward step. Because we were doing some really quite advanced stuff. For example, we learned how to use a camera, for example. And we’ve been doing that for two years. Whereas I went to university and the first course was, so here’s a camera, this is how to switch it on. This is how to switch it off is like, kind of done this. And I sat down with the lecturers and said, Look, look, I’ve just been doing this for two years, how long will it be before I feel like I’m now starting to learn. And this is pretty much going to be the first couple of years. So it was a case of Do I still stay doing something that I could really do quite easily. And just kind of have a good life for two years. But the way the way I’m kind of built if I’m not being pushed, if I’m not learning, I get very demotivated, very bored very quickly. So I just knew that wouldn’t work for me. So hence, I dropped out. And I felt hugely guilty about in time as well, because I was the first person in my family to have the opportunity to go to go to university. You know, that I could go and be afford to go. So I felt like almost like I was letting my family down. But it felt like the right thing to do.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, I’m going to take a slightly different route to my next question, because I’m also being led by my curiosity. Last time we spoke in your in your career, you have started a business. And you mentioned before that that was inspired by your your dad. Can you just talk a little bit more about how he has influenced you in the decision making in your career path?
Chris
Yeah, so my dad, he left school. He came from a very working class background. He left school and went straight into an apprenticeship from school. He wasn’t very academic. He took an apprenticeship, an apprentice, he became an apprentice toolmaker at an engineering company in in Manchester. And he, I think, he had a good few years of being a being a toolmaker. And then he had an opportunity to go what they called, or what did they call them? effectively, there was like a team lead what we would call a team leader position. But to them, what’s my dad in those days, it was almost like he was switching from being a worker, to being part of the management. I think it was it was called charge hand, I think it was called. So he had this opportunity. He was thinking about my mom, who was starting a family that we started to think about, this will be a bit more money. So he took that. And he kind of then it insert in similar ways to myself, he didn’t go to university, but then he started doing night school. So he did night school to pick up some of the he did a I think it was a what we’ve now classed as a hnd in engineering. He did that. And he eventually became a project manager, ironically, but in heavy engineering. I mean, he worked for like 30 years in engineering loved it. He’s fascinated by engineering. But he’d always had a desire to run his own business, he’d always wanted to own a corner shop. And he had the opportunity to take voluntary redundancy, with 30 years of service, his particular company, so he took the money and he went and bought a shop. He was an off licence and grocers and sandwich shop, kind of one of those shops that does everything. And I, we moved in when I was probably 12. So my kind of teenage years were spent in this shop, helping to go and buy stock and sell to customers and run the business and it was a kind of his dream really was to be his own boss, and to kind of prove he could do it. And I think somewhere along the way, I I ended up with the same ambition, but not necessarily a retail, but to just almost see if I could stand on my own two feet and survive and thrive hopefully, and that’s kind of what what led me to start in the business to be honest.
Pei Mun Lim
Sounds like the enterprising spirit was planted in you at a very early age. Talk to me about how that’s moved in terms of your so we met when you were in a and what we consider end customer. Tell me about how that came about in terms of how You chose Microsoft serum, which I was doing at that time over any other product.
Chris
So, so as you say, this was around kind of 2008. And in back in 2008. Actually, when people talked about CRM systems, they generally meant Siebel, because Siebel was the number one, Salesforce was really just starting, or starting to get real traction, but it was generally a sale system. It was generally about opportunity and lead management, there weren’t really a full end to end CRM at that point. And then we’re still very new, the cloud really was quite a new concept at the time still, also. And it was still I think, very much a mentality that invest in in in infrastructure, from a capital a capital investment point of view, still the the natural default approach to technology investments, so it was a possibly a tough sell to try and go for Salesforce at that time anyway. And essentially, we tried, we tried Siebel, but we couldn’t afford Siebel on premise. I think we actually did explore it as an option. And we were a midsize telco ISP, I think we were quoted a million pounds, which towards was, at that time, three times our entire capex investment budget for that given year. So we we’ve been, you know, traveling our investment, but only for one project, it would mean doing nothing else. And that that would be an interesting conversation with the finance director. And so we export Siebel on premise that didn’t work for us, we were told that they had a, they called it a cloud products. But really, it’s not what we would consider cloud today. It wasn’t a cloud native platform. It was a hosted instance of Siebel, that kind of been semi verticalized, where you couldn’t, you couldn’t really customize it, it was kind of it was out of the box, and you got what you got. The other problem was, it was hosted in the US on the west coast. And they their most of their customers were in the US on the west coast. So all the maintenance all happened kind of in a timeframe that would work for the West Coast of the US, which meant that at three o’clock in the afternoon, we’d find our CRM system not available for an hour, because they just wasn’t a you know, a truly global host cloud hosted platform. And so that that kind of we tried it, but it didn’t really work for us. And so we then explored alternatives, Jose, Salesforce was open come in, but we would look into solve both the sales and customer service problems. We had no kind of case management, we had no email management, we were still using Outlook inboxes, and spreadsheets and all that good stuff. So we then explored dynamics, which, again, you know, it was it was deemed at that time to be an on prem product, pretty much. And in reality, you also need to buy an awful lot of plugins to get all the features you needed. But you could kind of find a way to make it work. And that’s that’s kind of why we ended up where we ended up.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, thank you for that. It was really interesting to hear about how you got in there. So from there, you started your consulting business, am I right? Can you tell me what prompted you to think, Oh, I’m going to go and start off on my own. Now. Can you tell me about how that came about?
Chris
I suppose it’d been in the back of my mind for a little while, obviously, the seeds have been sown. A while back becoming grown up in the shop. I have reached a point in my life where I suppose that a crude or a fair amount of experience at that point in terms of delivery of both as an end or as an operating both an end customer scenario, as you mentioned, but I’d also prior to that worked in customer facing roles. And I’ve worked in a variety of different technologies. I’ve done some CRM, I’ve done some telephony, I’d worked in PRP, I’ve done the sap implementation in the US. So had quite a rounded set of skills. But I also felt that was at an age where I could afford to take some risks. I didn’t have any kind of dependencies, you know, it was just myself I was putting the risk effectively by, you know, sticking, sticking my neck out and trying to make a business work. I’d also met somebody at the company I’ve been working with, and we’d kind of hit it off in terms of we had similar values we had, we both had similar aspirations. So actually, I wasn’t doing it alone. I was doing it with someone and with a with a couple of other people involved as well. So it felt like it felt like there was a balance between describe it as I was almost experienced enough and stupid enough to try at the same time. I also Hoping to do it. Or the timing wasn’t ideal. I did it in the middle of the credit crunch, which was the stupid part. But yeah, it was that kind of balance of a bit of naivety and ambition and experience just all kind of came together at the right time.
Pei Mun Lim
How about the so it was yourself and a partner and a few other people? How did you assemble this team?
Chris
Strange how these things have sometimes happen in life, but it just kind of happened. So I met, I met the guy that the guy mentioned, I’d worked with Ray we’d, we worked together for a little while. So we had similar values and ambitions. There were other people who worked with us who we kind of all work together. And it reached a kind of a natural point at where we were all looking for something different. And it just, it just was kind of just a natural coming together of different people at different stages in life, just almost finding it together, there was something we could eat off for each other. And that’s kind of how we started, it was more through look, to some extent and planning. And that’s kind of how we got going.
Pei Mun Lim
I mean, didn’t work well, though. So what you’re talking about is luck, basically, in order to assemble a team who have the right skill sets, who have the right attitude and mindset and values to be able to work together. would you would you say that that’s something that you could recreate easily?
Chris
Don’t know, I think, on reflection, I suppose because we run the business for three years, we had, you know, we were introduced to some fantastic clients. We never, we never had to spend a pound on marketing or advertising. We just did it all through, you know, our own personal networks, our own contacts, and kind of, it seemed odd in some ways, we’d win a piece of work. And then through that piece of work, we’d meet somebody new, and they’d introduces something new. And therefore, when we got the next project, it was all very organic, I suppose looking back, what we lacked was one of us, not no one of us was kind of what you call an out and out salesperson, somebody who could kind of start cold and going open doors. That was the one thing looking back. And probably the reason why we didn’t really take off was we didn’t have that person in the mix. So we had a great mixture of people with you know, as I said, similar values. So whenever any big fall outs, or even huge any real disagreements, to be honest, but we probably did miss something in that we didn’t have that in the mix. And that that that will that will be one of my learnings.
Pei Mun Lim
How, how did, how did the business come to a close.
Chris
And it sort of came to a bit of a natural end. So I we’ve given it three years, as we started in the middle of the credit crunch, not a great time, our plan was to try and attract investment. And the problem was the because we were starting from zero. At that time, there were very few people who were willing to effectively invest in while there would be investing in all those people, they weren’t investing in AWS, as you know, we had a base of customers, or we developed a product or we had some kind of asset, we didn’t have that. So it meant that investment was hard to attract. So that model hadn’t really worked for us. And you kind of ended up in a situation as a consultancy, where it’s almost like contracting, but it had more variety to it. And we were a little bit more in control. But it wasn’t the business that we really wanted, it wasn’t going to be a situation where we could kind of grow it and bring more people in. And that was that was kind of what we wanted to do. So I think there’s almost a cycle, that if you’ve done three years within a business, you get to kind of a bit of a three year plan and you get to the end of that three years, it was probably a good time to then sit and go. Okay, so we’re not quite where we wanted to be. Do we now almost commit for the next two to three years? Or is it time to do something different? And I think in parallel, both of those in our lives, it’s, I think maybe our priorities, it’s slightly shifted. I wanted I wanted to go and kind of buy a house and kind of take on some more financial commitments. Felt like I’ve given it a fair try. So I’ve kind of scratched the itch, so I didn’t feel like I needed to kind of keep going for that. For that reason. It just became a natural end. And it was all very amicable which was good thing.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay. You also have a lot of experience with, as I say, end clients and consulting. Where does your passion lie?
Chris
My passion lies in making the clients, and that’s the, if I’m, if I’m a consultant, that’s my clients customer, making my clients customers life better. Now, whether that’s as a consultant, or whether I work for that particular business, I have never really cared one way or the other, it’s improving the lives of the end customer. That’s kind of what motivates me is improving their experience and improving the service we deliver to them. That’s what motivates me. And that’s what’s when I say, I’ve been curiosity LED, that’s why I’ve switched from maybe between different industries, because I wanted to learn how to help customers into different industry, or using a different technology, that’s what’s kind of led led me down that particular path. So it’s the end customer, rather than the Am I consultants? Or am I am I working for an end to an end client?
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, do you have a preference in which kind of roles you prefer, because they are different, as a consultant, you go in, you do the job, you move on to another project, whereas not so much for an end customer?
Chris
Yeah, I suppose I’ve probably taken more satisfaction, sometimes in the end customer business, because you get quite emotionally invested with as a consultant, sometimes, you do still get emotionally invested. But sometimes you’re only there for quite a short time, you might be there for, you know, six to 12 weeks, or you could be there for two years. It could be it could be quite ranging in timeframe. So I’ve probably experienced, I’ve experienced a lot of growth in end customer businesses. But then the flip side, as a consultant is when you can look at it the other way around. You the downsides of being in the end customer are things like corporate and company politics, you tend not to get as bogged down with that, as a consultant, you that’s their job. Now, being the consultancy can sometimes be political, because some businesses, you know, we’re more used to that than not. But I’d say, you know, the, the the, the upside of being a consultant is you tend not to get involved in those kind of petty politics type things, organizational issues, you’re there to focus on delivering a great project. And that’s quite nice, because it gives you a real sense of focus. And I find it really funny, really tough to choose if I’m honest, which is why I’ve probably bounced between both.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, okay. You have also implemented projects, both in the Microsoft world and the Salesforce world. We talked about this before. And can you can you share what your thoughts are about how they how they both stack up? Because if you Google, if somebody wants CRM, you know, they might Google Microsoft versus Salesforce, and you get qualified answers. Sometimes they they don’t quite tell the truth. So I’d like to get your insight on how to both stack up against each other.
Chris
It’s interesting. So if I go back to what I said earlier about when I first picked effectively my first CRM system, which was dynamics at the time, the number one was Siebel, Siebel. I like No way. I mean, Siebel fell off a cliff almost overnight their business. And it’s interesting now, I wonder sometimes whether Salesforce or the new Siebel because they’re now the number one, Siebel were the number one. Now, Salesforce, I think very much taken that place. It’s really hard to find to compare Salesforce and Microsoft because all Salesforce do is CRM, fully end to end. But that’s
Pei Mun Lim
so just when it’s raining, and I need to know just a sec. That’s okay. Sure, yeah.
Chris
So so all Salesforce, have they all they do is Salesforce is focused, is there a CRM provider fully end to end? That’s what they do. Whereas Microsoft Dynamics is only one product that they support. Obviously, they’ve got as your in terms of hosted services. They have Dynamics CRM, they have, you know, the finance platform as well. And they’ve got office 365 email teams, they’ve got such a diverse range of platforms. I suppose one observation about that. And the moment is where Microsoft are is. There’s always been, I think, our view that they’ve always had great individual products, but they’ve not necessarily been very well integrated. And I think that really starting to change now. I think they are starting to bring together all of this range of diverse products together in such a way that it becomes quite compelling. So if I, for example, we’re starting a business that are starting from scratch today, you know, I’d be saying to myself, I need email. I need productivity tools, and I need CRM. And I think To find it really, really easy to buy, you know that as a package from Microsoft, so I think in the startup arena, I find that very compelling proposition. If I was an enterprise customer, I think there’s still a little bit of a hint that Microsoft isn’t really yet the AARP company competitor to Salesforce, in terms of its functional depth. So I think they’re kind of, they’re both progressing really, really well. And I wonder, if there’s gonna come a point, when they’ll start to cross over, maybe I don’t know, Salesforce has also genuinely got a bit of a perception around, it’s quite expensive, which is true. So again, if you’re in a startup business, you might find the price tag a little bit prohibitive. So I would I just wonder whether they’re going to kind of meet somewhere in the middle at some stage, I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how it pans out. Because I do think there are other CRM platforms out there, but the generally, they’re the you would choose them. Because you’re, you’ve got a completely different technology strategy. So if you went in with SAP, and you binary RP stack, because you will have no work in manufacturing, there may be their CRM platform being fully integrated, we’ll have a compelling reason to buy it. But that’s almost driven by a different kind of technology strategy. But putting that to one side, I think it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. Because my other observation on sales forces, I think they’re not quite as nimble as they used to be. So they have made acquisitions over the years. But their integration of those products, I think it’s not quite as quick as it used to be, which was, ironically, the criticism people used to make of Microsoft, that they had all these products that weren’t fully integrated. So it’s a really interesting space, I think.
Pei Mun Lim
So they are, as you say, making a lot of acquisitions. Do you feel that they’ve diluted the CRM around, or
Chris
I wouldn’t say they’ve diluted it, I think there was a time when there was a time when they were going down the route of love when they acquired Heroku, for example, which is kind of a almost like a hosting platform for Scrum force.com platform. Ironically, the business that this business that we started, our website was hosted on Heroku. It was free of charge, we run a website for three years, but for no money at all. It was brilliant. But was that really what Salesforce were about? So there was the odd acquisition that seemed a little bit odd at the time that we then didn’t really do anything with. But I think, you know, they’ve acquired things like marketing automation, they’ve acquired CQ capability. Obviously, the big one recently has been tableau. That’s a massive acquisition. And that makes a huge amount of sense, because I just think, you know, some of the out of the box, reports in dashboard was a little bit limited, to be honest. Obviously, Tableau is like way, top end, kind of kind of EMI and visualization products. So that makes a lot of sense to me as well. I’m not sure they’re diluting the products. But as I say, it seems that as they got bigger, when they do make an acquisition, it’s now just much harder to integrate that product in because they’ve got a lot of customers now to worry about and care for and look after. And the stack is becoming more complex. So it is that it is a natural, I think, byproduct of growth to some extent. But yeah, be interested, see where they go next.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, so just going back to your Korea, and my head, I was trying to pigeonhole you. Are you? Are you a generalist project slash program manager? Or are you a technical solution? It feels like just looking here at your LinkedIn profile, you’ve got a healthy mix of both. And you’re the, what I would see as the perfect kind of solution architect, somebody who understands business understands project human behavior, but also understands the product in what it can do for them. Where do you Where do you sit most comfortably.
Chris
And personally, I find I prefer to sit in the middle. So so most recently, I’ve been I’ve been fulfilling kind of business architect type roles where I’ve been looking at how we essentially develop and change a business or a business process to maximize the advantage that technology can bring. Sometimes you can buy a technology and try to kind of bend it out of shape. And that can be a bad thing, and sometimes actually show you the business that needs to change, particularly if you can have quite an old business that hasn’t really You kind of move with the times as it were. And then other times, actually, it’s, you know, it’s the other way around. So I like to sit in the middle. Interestingly, though, I think other people have tried to pigeonhole me. So people generally seem to feel more comfortable with people at one end or the other. You’re either technical for your business, whereas I’m in the middle. And I’m happy to be where I am. But it is, it is a tricky one. It is a tricky one.
Pei Mun Lim
What would you say to someone who is aspiring to do the kind of things that you do? So your career path has been, as you say, quite following your curiosity and happenstance, if somebody wanted to do what you do, what what would you suggest that they get started with,
Chris
um, I suppose to some extent, I would worry less about the job, or the role that you’re in and just think more about the knowledge and skills that you’re acquiring. In hindsight, that’s kind of what I did. But I didn’t know I was doing it at the time. That curiousity led piece was: I was acquiring new skills and new knowledge. And it was the I was changing role to require it not, I thought, Oh, I want to be a, I want to sit on a help desk, or I want to be a tester it was what will take in this role, allow me to do, what will I learn from it. And I think if you if you’re going with that approach, what that means is, you’ll you’ll probably inhabit roles that allow you to learn, you know, great starting roles are testing, for example, or business analysis is a great entry point as well. So, you know, and roles that kind of expose you to a range of different businesses or technologies or even better. So I would say be led by that don’t necessarily be led by, you know, oh, I really want to be, you know, I don’t know, a business analyst or a project manager or a program manager, you will, if that’s ultimately your aspiration you can get, but worried initially about knowledge and skills start from that. Start from there, because those are universal. And, and also, you find that, actually, they open the doors that you haven’t anticipated. So. So yeah, being the knowledge and skill that don’t be led by job titles and roles.
Pei Mun Lim
That nicely kind of segues me into my next question, which is, it sounds like you were quite sensible as you were growing up anyway. But are there any lessons you’ve learned now that you might want to share with your 20 year old self? If you could go back
Chris
for a while? Would my 20 year old self and listened sleep? That’s the that’s the real question. And I was quite, I was quite, I was quite focused, actually, strangely, and quite driven in kind of my early 20s. I still on to an extent, but I was like, really super, kind of on it, and whatnot.
And
Chris
I’m not sure there’s something I would, I would, I would almost, because I’ve had such a lot of fun. On my career, I’m not sure I’d want to almost try and change it. And I think I think I’m happy with the path that follows. I don’t look back and say, Oh, I wish I’d made a different decision. You know, the business didn’t pan out, I really wanted to do it. It didn’t pan out. I learned how to run a business. That then helps me understand. You know, even in the project, since I had a more in depth knowledge about how my customers businesses then operated and ran and Adam, you know, an appreciation that hadn’t got pre previous yet. So even though some things didn’t work out as unblocked, I don’t think I’d go back and change them because they’ve made me do the way up to date to be honest.
Pei Mun Lim
Very sound, I like that answer. That means you, I get you, you. You’ve taken the kind of part that meant you had very little regrets. Because they all created the use that you are today.
Chris
Yeah, we’ve even things like when I got the phone call to say, Would you like to go to the US and be a project manager? And I remember thinking, I’ve been a project manager before, and I thought, let’s do it. Let’s try. What’s the worst that can happen? I think if I was to go back and give myself advice, maybe I would, maybe I would have made a different decision. And that was career changing. That
Pei Mun Lim
sounds like it. And so we were talking before about what the future holds. Both you and I can we come from process mapping business analysis that seems to that is a part of my job that I really enjoyed in terms of how COVID has changed business practices. What have you noticed? In the consulting world now versus pre COVID?
Chris
I mean, clearly, we’ve had to deal with, you know, working entirely virtually. So. So I joined my current company, on April the 19th, which was right in the middle of lockdown. This was when everything was being locked down. And I’ve been through the recruiting process, I think I met six people at the company at that point in time, looking forward to meeting all my colleagues, but then I haven’t when they were 35, I think 35 employees in Manchester. So there’s a whole roomful of people I haven’t met, which is strange. I work with three different clients, all of whom I’ve worked 100%, virtually, with. And I’ve learned that quite hard, you know, the learning curve, to understand the client business, understand the problem trying to solve, it is harder, virtually. Because you don’t get that kind of quick, everything. If you’ve got questions, everything needs a call or a meeting, yes, you can send email, but emails are things that people deal with when they have time. You know, just being able to sit next to somebody and say, Hey, we got five minutes, I just need to explore something with you, you, you, we’ve lost that at the moment. So that’s when I think, at the moment, projects I think are taking just a little bit longer. In that kind of early phase, once you picked up the knowledge and you kind of know the people, then Off you go, it doesn’t kind of hold you back at that point. And I suppose the flip side is, you know, you’ve got a better work life balance, you’ve got time to focus. So you know, it has pros and cons, but I think it has from consulting, I think it’s been a challenging time, I think going forward with this convention and see how it how it can recenter itself, I think we are going to end up in some kind of hybrid between the two, I don’t think we’ll go back to five days in the office. I think from what I hear lots of businesses are really looking at their real estate strategy, you know, how many offices and how much office space they want to have. Lots of businesses have invested hugely now, possibly earlier than they plan to in the technology to support virtual working, you know, spoke to one customer who had an on premise phone system. And in Laughlin, so they had to literally switch from an on premise phone system to a hosted phone system almost overnight. They’ve done that now. So they’re not just going to throw that away. So I think we’ll go back to some kind of balanced approach. It will be interesting to see where that balance lies. It’ll be interesting to see how that how that pans out.
Pei Mun Lim
We also talked previously about kind of tools that you’ve now had to adopt, because it’s all virtual. And when I was doing face to face process mapping, it was so much easier with brown paper. Yeah, yeah, taking notes and getting everyone engaged. But now it’s all online. How do you run your process workshops.
Chris
So I mean, there are some great tools. I mean, I’ve not used I’m not used, there is a whiteboard available with Microsoft Teams, I haven’t used that myself, I have used something called mirror, which is kind of a virtual whiteboard. That’s, that works really, really well, it takes a little bit of practice. So whereas you know, in a, in a physical world, you just think about optical dependant start drawing. Obviously, if it’s a virtual tool, you need to give yourself the chance to learn how it works. And also how people behave when they when you put them in a in a virtual workshop, because they’ve not seen that tool before. So you know, you need to plan for, okay, we’re doing a virtual workshop, I’m going to give you five minutes just to explore and get to learn with all the what the buttons do, and I’ll talk you through it. So once you allow for that, it actually works really, really well. I also, back in the home office, I still have a physical whiteboards. So I can still use that. It’s it’s behind my desk, and I can still draw on it. And you can still see from the webcam. So you can still make it work. But it needs a bit more pre planning. I know workshops always need a bit of pre planning, but there’s just an extra 5% I’d say.
Pei Mun Lim
No, absolutely. I think it’s going to change quite to a direction. That’s not quite my favorite. Because I feel like in person events because there’s just so much more energy you can get off people. Yeah,
Chris
yeah, I agree. And the energy is this is one of the one of the things you really need to think about as well. And as the facilitator, you also I think you really do set the tone and you have to put a lot of energy in into a virtual workshop to get the energy out. And I think you also have to think much more about short bursts. So whereas in a physical setting, if you’ve got, let’s say, an all day workshop, you might break every hour and a half to two hours. I think in a virtual setting, I’d say 40 to 60 minutes, it needs to be much more broken up, because I think you, you get fatigue more quickly. And I think if you’ve got a large group, I think, if you’re not always engaged at the same time, then people can kind of tune out a little bit. And it also means that, I don’t know sometimes this is annoying. In a workshop, ironically, you get little side conversations going on, which if they’re out of control in a workshop can sometimes mean you lose control the workshop, but sometimes they actually help accelerate the process, because you can, you can have multiple conversations. But in a virtual workshop, there’s really only one, because we’ve there’s only one speaker at any one time. So it does make it slightly slower. So there’s a few little behavioral aspects that I think needs to be thought about, but it can be done, it can be done.
Pei Mun Lim
Definitely, as I say, I’m not a super big fan, but that’s the way it’s going to go. Given you’re experiencing quite a lot of projects, are there any that come to mind when I say, what what kind of projects that were character building, or those that you took away biggest lessons from?
Chris
I think probably the one I mentioned, where I got the phone call to go see us because I was going into a project with minimal experience. As a project manager of SAP, not the most straightforward system to deliver. We had a fantastic implementation, we were on time we were on budget, we were a week early, in fact, which is like unheard of, especially with SAP. And it was a fantastic project. So we went live, I learned an awful lot. But then we were, we were a team of I think there was five of us at the end. everybody else’s visa was running out a week after we’ve gone live mine, because I’d been back a bit earlier, I’ve kind of extended nine. So I had to drive the whole team to the airport. So they could go home, renew their visas, and then went back to the office. And literally I got back to the office to find the building manager in, you know, who was hugely panicking at the time, because we’d run the first billing run, and the bills have come out. And he’d spotted some of them. Or at least he initially thought all of them were wrong. But they were all wrong by a number of digits. So what should have been a, you know, $250 water bill was actually $250,000. So that was a bit of a moment where we we had to take a bit of a pause. And I had to go to the director of the water authority that time and say we’ve had to stop billing, because we’ve got an issue with the bills, having just gone live and everybody feeling, you know, positive about what we’d achieved. So that was a that was a character building moment for me, I think.
Pei Mun Lim
So tell me about how you manage that situation with the client? Because obviously anyone listening would say, Oh, my God, that is one go live is became so how did you manage the client?
Chris
He was all about frequent communication. So obviously, the director wasn’t happy that we’d have this problem. But we’d caught it early. So you know, it’s not like we’d send the bills in the post, the customers had opened them and had gone into the press, which he would have done if that if they had if they hadn’t been hadn’t been checked. So it’s good that we capture the issue, obviously, then the next problem, the next question is, what’s the cause? And then the second question after that is how do we fix it? And then the third question is, how long is that going to take? Because obviously, billing is to collect cash and without cash coming in, that can impact cash flow. So time is a factor as well. So what I would say I have been flagged early, caught early, and then fronted or not tried to kind of, you know, brush it under the carpet, I’ll find a quick way around the problem we could have done, we could have kind of just amended those bills, got them out. The right thing to do was to stop under understand the underlying problem, which we got to within about 24 hours, and then understand what we needed to do to kind of unwind and fix it. But I was speaking to I was speaking to the director probably once every two hours for the first two to three days. Even if it was just a quick two minute conversation, the courage say, look, this is where we’re up to this what we’re doing now. And he actually offering advice as well, because, you know, you have knowledge of how the business operated. And then the problem that turned out to be something relatively, you know, relatively small, it wasn’t all of the bills, I think it was about 5% of the bills. And it was 5% of the customers had a slightly older type of water meter, and essentially read in the data migration last a digit. So therefore, the billing system for the meter going all the way around. And that’s that was what the underlying problem was. So we then had to kind of fix some data, and then reproduce the bills. And and the thing that amuses me is that in the time this took to fix, the rest of the team had gone off, renewed the visas, they arrived back, and they arrived just in time to help me put all of the new bills in the envelopes.
Pei Mun Lim
Wow. Okay, sounds pretty harrowing. So a few days, you said for all of that, too.
Chris
We thought end to end to get the to get the bills stopped, fixed, corrected. Reprinted, and in the mail, it took about seven days. Okay.
Pei Mun Lim
Is this something that, on hindsight, you could have captured? Before go live?
Chris
Yeah, I think so. I think I think if you find 5% or 5%, initially, the fact the facts 5% of your customer base. I think there’s something in our, in our analysis of the data that was lacking in that we hadn’t spotted this particular type of meter. That being said, I’m not sure quite what I mean, I wasn’t at the time, you know, I’m no, I’m no data data specialist. But I think that type of issue I think you’d hoped to spot earlier, maybe we should be on a little bit deeper and taken a bit more care over our initial analysis. But we had all the checks and balances in that meant we captured the problem. So we had, we had on the billing platform, you kind of check for very, very low bills. So you don’t want bills that are like four cents, because it costs more to mail, and he does to produce it. And you also have an upper threshold, and it was the upper threshold that got that got kind of the flag had been raised that, you know, this isn’t a $20,000 bill, this is a $200,000 bill. And it’s a you know, it’s a domestic water meter. So the checks and balances kicked in, but I would have hoped to have found it earlier.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, so just just taking it back to your career with the different partners, consulting partners, it sounds like you’ve worked with a range of different sizes. So KPMG is huge compared slalom. What your thoughts on the different cultures of the different size partners that you’ve worked in?
Chris
Um, well, I’d say KPMG, you know, big for Big Five, consultancy? You know, that is almost different. Every other business I’ve ever worked in. It’s a partner driven business. It’s a partnership effectively, that that creates a different culture, in terms of the way it behaves. So that almost is the one that stands out as being, you know, it took me some time to kind of understand how the business operated, how decisions were made, how to get yourself known around the firm. You know, one one thing I noticed, it’s a very KPMG might not like me for saying this. It is a very London centric business. You know, that their head offices in London, yes, they have regional offices. But my experience was, you know, to be to progress to get somewhere you really had to be traveling to London and getting itself known in the London office to really make progress, which is a shame. It really is a shame. The other business I’ve worked in, I’ve worked in camps. Well, my business was like, you know, five, five of those five or six of those. Right to you know, private equity for new businesses are four to 600 people, they’re quite fun because if there’s private equity investment involved, generally you’re in high growth mode, that’s, you know, can be quite, quite good. Quite a good challenge as well try keep up, keep pace, keep moving. You have to roll slightly different but they’ve all kind of got the pros and cons.
Pei Mun Lim
And slaloms sits right in the sweet spot for you in terms of size.
Chris
Yeah, I think so. It’s it’s an interesting one because slalom, as you say, slalom in the UK, we’re you know, we’re still relatively small. You know, I think there’s what 35 overs in Manchester, you know, globally, I think we’re just about to hit 10,000 employees, but 1000 of those are outside of the US so Obviously the US, you know, a big company, not not as big and as well known globally. Well, the interesting part of that is that I think the the next stage on slaloms global journey, so having grown successful in the US, how does it grow? Now, in other countries? You know, Manchester, Manchester opens, I think the last time we opened up in Australia, just after lockdown hit. So that’s kind of our newest office, he won’t be the last, they’ll be more to come.
Pei Mun Lim
sounds quite exciting. Right. So just, we’re just about to wrap up. But I have a few questions about you, in particular, by us person, what kind of quirks do you have that you that your team members may not be aware of?
Chris
Kind of quirks. And so, I, one thing I found out sort of reflected on a lot of deltas, is it really matters to me to understand when a decision is taken, why that decision has been taken in that particular way, or what the logic was to arrive at a particular decision. So I’ve, I’ve sometimes been challenged by, by leaders, who say, well, we decided to do this. And I’ll say, but why are we doing that? And they’ll say, Well, this is why that doesn’t that reasoning, that decision? That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m absolutely okay with somebody saying, actually, we’ve taken this decision, you just need to kind of just get on with it. If you tell me that. If you try to give me a logical reason that doesn’t actually support the position, then I’ll just keep asking why. And I’ll just, it’ll just wind you up, and it will wind me up. That’s one thing I’ve learned.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay. So this is something you tell people’s upfront saying, make sure that you’re candid with me as to
Chris
what I say is locked, if you’re telling me that this is what we’re doing, and that the decision is this, then tell me that that’s fine. If there are other reasons that you can’t share with me. I’m absolutely fine with it. But just tell me that, but don’t try and give me an illogical answer to a decision. It just, it just makes my brain fry.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, okay. All this kind of slightly, don’t give this answer to the next question it which is what will you not tolerate in others? So we’ve already given that answer a different one.
Chris
Yeah, okay. I get really frustrated by unrealized potential. And if I see the potential in people, or the potential in a business, or potential in a situation that actually does something really positive, we can create here, but it almost it gets missed, or you don’t seize the opportunity, or the person doesn’t kind of put the effort in to make the most of it. I find that really frustrating. I find that really frustrated. Yeah, I find it really sad that I can see potential in people that they don’t make the most of it. Because the way I look at myself, perhaps is that my, my career has been driven by trying to maximize what I have available to me, I’m not the cleverest person in the room. You know, I’m not the most hard working person in the room, or whatever talents I have. I’ll try and make the most of them. And that has taken me on a great an interesting journey. And I hope that other people feel the same way. Now, to be fair, you could say, I’m almost trying to then therefore impose my worldview on other people. But yeah, that that frustrates me if I see unrealized potential.
Pei Mun Lim
What are the kinds of things that people misunderstand about you? Oh, and
Chris
I think sometimes, I can appear more confident about something than I really am. And I don’t know whether that’s because sometimes as a consultant, you’re there to, you know, show leadership. So sometimes you need to kind of say, you know, this is, you know, this is the right thing for us to do. Not always certain, but, but sometimes you’ve got to give other people the confidence in the direction you’re choosing to take, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m as confident myself in what I may have just suggested. I think people tend to think I’m sometimes more confident that I really am myself.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, I was going to say, fake it till you make it but not really.
Chris
Yeah, to an extent, to an extent I think I think it’s important sometimes that even if you’re uncertain giving direction gives people a sense of purpose. And if you’re if you’re struggling with confidence that can sometimes transmitted through to the people you’re working with. And so sometimes you just kind of have to, you know, I say fake it till you make it. But yeah, that doesn’t mean I’m always necessarily a true believer.
Pei Mun Lim
What are your How do you make decisions? When are you? Are you a very logical thinker?
Chris
Yes. Yeah. I think going back to what I said before, I have to come to a logical decision. I sometimes find, even though I’ve, you know, you make you have a kind of a gut feel, sometimes, even though I’ve got feel feels pretty strong. I still need to work out why. Which might seem a bit bizarre, or the people just seem to just have gotten go. And they’re probably not perhaps more entrepreneurial than I am. But that that’s, I have to then think, oh, why did I think that? Oh, I thought that because of this, as long as I’ve got that kind of sense of logic behind it, that’ll be fine with
Pei Mun Lim
it. Okay, thank you for that. One. Last question. Is there a? Do you have anything a personal or professional kind of like project or thing that you’re really excited about, at the moment, anything like building a shed or something? I’ll be?
Chris
Well, so I’m planning. So having spent 15 months in my home office, and we bought the house that we’re in now, in 2018, I didn’t necessarily think I’d spend, you know, a year and a half, in what in what became the home office, it went through a slightly rapid redevelopment, I had some back issues, that meant I needed to get a standing desk. So I kind of had to get the old desk out, get a standing desk in. So it’s kind of been made to work, but it’s not necessarily my most love room. It’s not I’ve not created it as a nice environment. So I have got some ideas around what I want to do with it. But it involves new flooring, redecorating the walls, rethinking the layouts. It’s nice. It’s not a big room. But of course, I’m working in it every day. So it’s, it’s hard to. It’ll take me some planning, but essentially, that’s going to be my next DIY project is upgrading the home office. So it’s a slightly nicer place to be.
Pei Mun Lim
Especially since we’re going we’re spending a lot of time at home. The Office. Okay, thank you very much, Chris. I really appreciate the second round of interview with you. We covered almost everything that we did before anymore, and I managed to slip in some interesting questions towards the end. Thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Chris
Welcome. I’ll go and get some ice on my face. Now. I think
Pei Mun Lim
Thank you.