Intro
One day in the mid-nineties I was sitting in a boardroom in Bracknell. A guy walked in. He looked at me and said “you’ve got a famous name haven’t you?”
I said “you have too. I’ll pour oil on the cricket pitch, you play the piano.”
His name was Les Dawson. We both laughed.
We didn’t talk about technology at all that day. We talked about risk. We talked about how the suppliers for the programme could genuinely understand what they needed to deliver to make the programme successful.
He asked me to write a risk paper off the back of it. I did.
Chris Harrison and I wore a groove in the M40 over the next year driving up and down to Solihull. In 1996, Les trusted us to deliver one of the biggest technology projects in the UK, implementing the datacentres and databases for the introduction of competition in the UK gas market.
The reason we won was not the technology, although that mattered. It was trust. Trust to deliver the outcomes that mattered.
But Jim had a problem. He needed a way to engage company executives in understanding what the cyber threat meant for their business.
He made a bold decision. Rather than keep the conversation in technical language, he chose to connect cyber risk directly to business impact. No jargon. No abstractions. Straight, plain language that a board could actually act on.
What excited me was the realisation that we had the capability to engage a non-technical audience in what mattered most to the company, the impact on business outcomes.
We built a product called Secure Boardroom. It showed the threat level to each part of the business in terms executives could read and respond to.
Jim’s decision to change the conversation was a catalyst to accelerating the performance of the business, both increasing revenue and margin in existing contracts and acquiring new business.
Following the implementation of Secure Boardroom, the business was acquired by a large outsourcing company and went on to become their cyber security division in the UK.
His clients were surrounded by data. Pages and pages of KPIs. Reports that described activity without ever quite explaining what was actually happening or what it meant.
Craig could have kept it that way. Most people did.
What Craig did was honest. He chose to move to an open, transparent platform for discussing contract performance. To put the real picture on the table, even when that picture was not perfect. That takes courage in a large outsourcing business where relationships and renewals depend on confidence.
We built a portal that made the performance of the companies contracts visible and understandable to the customer. A shared environment where supplier and client could look at the same picture, discuss what is working and what needs attention. An open and transparent basis to evidence performance and value.
We deployed that capability across more than 30 contracts, changing the nature of conversations and providing a platform for growth together.
Don had a problem he kept running into. Mainly due to the fact that the business was very good at managing large services contracts for some of the world’s largest companies, the customer didn’t see the effort and activity that it took to deliver such a good service. Contracts were rolling off at the end of the contract term. Relationships that should have been solid, fraying. Clients who didn’t fully understand the value of what they had until it was gone.
I asked him what difference it would make if they could relate an outage to something the client actually cared about. Not system downtime. Revenue loss. Business impact.
Don chose to find out. We built a system through five proof of concepts with some of the world’s largest banks.
His decision to connect performance to business outcomes changed the renewal conversation entirely. A shift from price to business value.
Les in Bracknell. Jim in Warrington. Craig at his desk in London. Don trying to understand why good work wasn’t translating into renewed trust.
Different decades. Different challenges. Different pressures.
But every one of them made the same kind of decision. They chose to move the conversation away from activity and towards outcomes.
About a year ago I found myself thinking about how we could take a lot of this experience, harness new technology, and create a compelling capability for the mid-market. I met Sam Collett. I asked him to read a key book on the subject.
Sam read it. We talked. And we realised we could build something fascinating together, combining our experience of driving business results and implementing world class technology.
This is why we formed ēventūs.do.
Stop Guessing. Start Knowing. Accelerate Results.
