Past Featured Chairmen

While some see only gloom and job losses in a recession, Nic Birtles, Chairman of Konetic and a 40-year veteran of the IT industry sees opportunity and challenge.
 
It is perhaps this contrarian nature that has helped carry him to the very top of the profession and helps him to inspire the next generation of IT business leaders.

“I think there are tremendous opportunities right now,” he says. 

“There are two sorts of companies: those that just hunker down and hope they can ride it out, or those that use the opportunity to have a look at the fundamentals of their business and come up with a new strategy which should include new technology.

“It can also be a great time to launch a company. There is often a lot of talented people available and equipment can be cheap.”

Birtles started life as a chemist, but on getting to university he discovered the keyboard rather more to his liking than the Bunsen burner. On leaving university, he fancied the new world of computers and found himself a Cobol and Fortran programmer.

But it wasn't long before he found his true niche. “I found I was good at explaining technical things to non-technical people. I was a good coder, but there were people who were a lot better than me. And I have always wanted to be the best at whatever it is I do.”
A career in sales and marketing beckoned.

The young Birtles had that most rare of things – a career plan, well, of sorts. “I worked on the basis not of how much I was going to get paid, but of what I could learn from the company. I wanted to work for the best companies and with great people. Salary was secondary to that.

“My view was that if I could help my boss be more successful, then hopefully he would mentor me and help me grow my career”

It was a strategy that paid off. Before long Birtles was running the European operations for Ingres, a competitor then to Oracle, and after that he was running the European arm for Gupta, and, as that was doing better than the parent company, was asked to run the whole show. That was how, just on the dawn of the internet, he found himself in Silicon Valley.

By chance he and his family found themselves living next door to a professor at Stanford University. Chatting away his neighbour invited him along to a “Dragon's Den” type event where young would-be entrepreneurs, typically post-grads, pitch their business plans. The evening he went along there were two young guys who spent their every spare hour cataloguing websites. It was the first business pitch by Jerry Yang and David Filo – the founders of Yahoo.

(Birtles was shrewd enough to buy in at the Yahoo IPO and held his shares until the company turned down Microsoft's offer. That, he said, was time to get out.).

But more important than rubbing shoulders with two putative giants of the internet, Birtles was impressed by the mentoring role that the university provided, and the unwritten law that successful companies would give their alma matter shares in their company in return. It was an idea he was to bring back to the UK years later to help fund the charitable work of the Information Technologists Company.

Birtles career continued its ascent and after a welcome career break, travelling around the States for a year, he returned to the UK to begin his second career – as an angel investor and non-executive.

Since moving back to the UK in 2002, Birtles is Chairman of Konetic, which provides Internet based Recruitment Processing Software and Services, Chairman of PTC Software, a leading provider of Enterprise Systems Management Software to local government and managed service providers. Chairman of Agena, an early stage company that provides risk assessment and modelling software for major IT and software development projects plus large defence and transportation projects and Chairman of Newfield IT which provides software and services to enable organisations achieve control of their document storage and printing costs.

But his work as a liveryman with the Information Technologists Company, and in particular founding and running their Entrepreneurship panel that has given him the greatest insight into the state of the industry today, and many of the problems that the country faces.

“There is nothing like the existing networks and community that exists in America for new start ups. Birtles and the livery company are trying to fill the hole, not just with angel money, but something much more valuable, experience and mentoring. The panel is a chance for experienced executives to give something back, to act as mentors and guides to help new companies. Our role is to help the entrepreneurs to be successful.”

Birtles is critical of the culture in this country that does little to help people succeed, and all too often that is coupled with a poverty of ambition.

At a recent seminar, he lambasted the climate in this country. “It is not just shortage of money that is impacting UK entrepreneurial development, but a continual lowering in recent years of an appetite for risk, a poor infrastructure to accommodate entrepreneurs (for example, among the legal and accounting professions), and a talent gap.”

As a result, he says, the country will suffer. “I think that this cultural problem will certainly mean that we will not recover from recession as fast as America, for example.

“Over here, too often people want to build up a company, sell it for £10million and retire to the beach. In America successful entrepreneurs either want to build a £100+ million company, or if they sell at £10m they view that as their first company and go on to do it all over again. We don't seem to have that same drive.”

He is also critical of the lack of support from government. “They talk a lot about supporting entrepreneurs, but in reality very little is actually done. A few years ago there some very welcome schemes such as the small firms loan guarantee, R&D tax credits, and so forth, but there is nothing really now.”

“The real way the Government can help is by buying more new technology from early stage companies. In the US there is a program called A8 which means that every government dept has to spend a small part of its budget with A8 qualified companies, which include new- stage new technology companies. We need trade not aid.”

But he is optimistic. “We see so many good people at our events. You can tell when someone will succeed. They may not have the best business plan, or even the right skills and experience, but there are some people who just have what it takes, they have the vision, they are realistic about their plans, and they have the drive to make it happen.”

Birtles hopes that he, and others like him, can help to change the climate, expand people's horizons and help them achieve greater success. In a very real sense, the future of the country depends on it.

Nic started his IT career over 40 years ago initially as a Programmer, then moved in Sales, Marketing & Management. Nic was also on the Executive Council of the CSSA (the UK IT Industry Association now called Intellect) for several years, where he chaired their Single European Market Committee. He is currently the Chairman of the Entrepreneurship Committee for the Information Technologists Livery Company. Currently Nic is also an Angel Investor & Chairman in several early stage Software Companies. Nic has also written many published articles on IT Sales & Marketing Strategies plus co-authored a book, on the subject of motivation for business success, called "Ever Onward".