Past Featured Chairmen

Michael Hunt's business card has a single phrase printed on the back. “Hope is not a strategy” it reads. It is a lesson that he has learned and continues to learn the hard way.

A Canadian who spent time in Montreal, London, Brussels and Atlanta, Hunt has been in the industry for nearly as long as there has been an industry to be in.

Like so many, he sort of stumbled into it. “I majored in math and physics and didn't really know what to do. IBM had an aptitude test and by the fourth of fifth time I had taken it, I kind of knew what I wanted to do”.

Hunt joined the Canadian giant Alcan, involved in their systems department. He stayed a few years learning programming, systems design and project management skills before moving on.

It wasn't before too long that he ended up, seemingly set up for life, in the comforting world of academia, working for the systems department of the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada and doing some teaching work as well.

Hunt was introduced to the database solutions of a company called Cincom Systems. It was one of those unique points in a life time where you needed to make a strategic decision. “I had the choice. I could stay in academia, earning a pretty good salary, nice secure job. Or I could take a big pay cut with no security and enter the commercial world”. He has never looked back. He set up the Canadian sales and support organization and before long Hunt found himself setting up the Europe operations.

It was a challenging time.

“I had never sold anything in my life. On day one I remember thinking to myself I had better go and find some customers”. So I did. Like so many who have reached the very top of their worlds, it is sales and marketing that has been the cornerstone of Hunt's career.

“Products don't sell themselves. People need to sell value and people (customer) buy value”

These were pioneering and often scary days. Like many companies growing at a phenomonal rate, cash flow becomes a real issue. I had a call from the accountant one day, he recalled.

“We can't make the payroll, he said bluntly. I called back to the head office they also didn't have that kind of money to support us. 
In a rather dramatic scramble I had to fly back to London to the bank, and then I had to personally guarantee the $100,000 loan myself, before the bank would lend us the money.

Fortunately no-one but the accountant ever knew how close we came to a crisis in confidence. It was an old lesson, but one I had not learned  “cash is king”.

Never one to settle too long, it wasn't long before Hunt was on the move again; this time to back to the UK to set up the International operations of MSA (Management Science America). And several years late moving Atlanta, USA as President of MSA International and vice president of all Research & Development for MSA in Atlanta for two years. Also he also managed one half of the USA sales force for one year.

Working with the Americans was a very different experience, he recalled. They have a very different way of dealing with things and very America centric.

But it was while at MSA that Hunt saw firsthand a company that, like so many companies claimed to put their people first, but unlike most companies, actually did it.

John Imlay as CEO and Bill Graves as President really looked after their people. They had a great way of recognizing their top people and looking after them. But they also looked after everyone. If they came to visit Europe they made a point of meeting all the staff from receptionist to customer support, not just sales and management. 

MSA’s motto was “People are the Key” and we all wore a small key on our lapel which employees really appreciated. Once again, it was MSA's sales and marketing strengths that proved to be the cornerstone of their success. They had a sales methodology or process. Everyone knew what their responsibility was in the process was and this made a huge difference. More importantly the methodology was always reinforced by senior management.

When the company was sold to Dun and Bradstreet, Hunt's equity share in the company gave him the cushion of being able to pick and chose what he did next and with his international experience as well as an impressive track record, the Non Exec role was the obvious way forward.

For seven years Hunt was a NED, and Chair of the remuneration committee, for AchillesGroup Limited, a procurement solutions and services enterprise to the utilities oil & gas, transport, and government sectors. He is also Non Executive Chairman ofSilanis International   
Limited, and a Non Executive Director of Silanis Technology Inc, the world’s leading provider of electronic signature and digital signature software.

Interestingly in these financially troubled times, Hunt sees the most important challenge facing companies in the long-term is not in the financial area, but in the often talked about, but seldom practiced, area of Corporate Social Responsibility.

In his opinion this is going to be increasingly important. One of the major responsibilities of the board of directors and management is to make sure that CSR is taken seriously and there is a strategy.

He comes at this not from some wooly-hatted? liberal approach, but a hard financial reality. Nike had hundreds of millions of dollars wiped from their value when it was caught up in a scandal over suppliers using child labour. Companies need to understand this has bottom-line consequencies.

Hunt predicts that in the same way that organisations now have remuneration, audit, nomination committees, in  future they will have to have a CSR committee to ensure it is fulfilling its corporate obligations.

So convinced is he that this is the way that when considering companies, how they conduct their CSR obligations is one of the key things Hunt considers very carefully.

That, and not surprisingly, their sales and marketing operation.

You sometimes see companies that will spend hundreds of thousands in sales training, but if they don't embrace this right across the company for sales people and non-sales and is reinforced by management  then it is a waste of money. It isn't something you can just do and tick a box, it has to be part of the way the company works  from the bottom to the CEO at the top.

Speaking of CEOs, one of Hunt's companies recently had to replace a CEO, an experience he says that boards should not be afraid of. The incumbent was a very good CEO for the company as it was, but as the company had grown, he had not demonstrated he had the vision to chart the future.

"You see this a lot. Doing the same, only more of it is not a strategy to grow a company.  You can't just hope that it will keep on working."

Instead Hunt was instrumental in convincing the board they need a new CEO. It needed someone with strategic vision, not just operational experience. Someone who looks beyond the next year, and the one after that. Someone who has the bold vision to say  'what we need is this' and then has the desire to validate their strategy, gain shareholder, management, employee, and customer buy in, and see it through.

It is no good having someone who just hopes that the old ways will work.

Hope really is not a strategy.

Michael Hunt is Chairman of Silaris International - electronic signatures and a strategic Advisor to the board of Nstein Inc. - Intelligent Digital Solutions for the Publishing Industry - Managing Each Stage of the Digital Content Supply Chain.