Past Featured Chairmen

Tina Rogers is one of the country's most successful IT businesswomen. Her CV is littered with a list of non-exec chairmanships as long as your arm. She has led buy outs, turned failing companies round, raised finance, sold companies, and made herself and many of her colleagues wealthy. So have many other IT leaders of today, but two things make Rogers, if not unique, then in a very, very exclusive club. Firstly she is a woman in a male-dominated market. So what you say? There are some female IT leaders. True, but how many of them come from an inner-city council estate and left school at 16? Exactly.

Rogers insists that her career and success are based on luck. But as the South African golfer Gary Player commented, 'The harder you work, the luckier you get.'

'I came from a very poor background,' says Rogers. 'I got into grammar school but my mother only agreed to send me there if I left at 16. We couldn't afford the school uniform so I could only go for five years.' She left school with a raft of O levels (she came top in the city of Cardiff) and just stumbled into programming. 'A friend of my aunt's worked for ICL and said I should look into it. I liked maths so it seemed to make sense.'

She joined the Hodge group as a programmer. 'I was the world's worst' she claims, but can't have been that bad as she was taken on by Olivetti as a systems consultant. 'At that point I didn't have a career, only a job.' And her life nearly followed a very different path. At 20 Rogers got married and at 27 had a son. She gave up work to become a full-time mother.

The storybook life of domestic bliss was not to be, for three years later she was divorced and unemployed. 'There I was, 30 years old with three-year-old Jonathan and no job. I had to do something.' She went back to the IT industry.

Through sheer determination and grind she ended up as a consultant for a plc, buying in systems. 'That was the start of things going well.' One company was looking for software for a project costing system, but none could be found. 'So I thought we should write it ourselves. We wrote it and the company would be our first customer. It went very well indeed and we started to sell it outside the group.

'Almost by accident we had grown a software development house. It was going really well. I was at this point the customer services director and together with two other directors we organised a management buy out from the plc.'

This was the start of Rogers' real career. For success bred success. The company went from strength to strength, acquiring another company to expand. 'The experience was invaluable. I was the managing director of a software house. I was faced with all the problems, all the things, that an MD is faced with. It was a very steep learning curve. But I did it.'

'We had two companies at that point. My business partner was running one, and I was running the other. The software company was doing very well and attracting attention and some very serious offers.'

In the end Misys bought the company, and Rogers went from being MD of her own company to being one of 28 MD's. 'Well I went from the sublime to the ridiculous. When you run your own company you have to know a bit about everything. When you are part of a large plc there's always someone you can turn to for support.

'There may be nothing like the pressure on you but nor is there the excitement and satisfaction.'

She stayed for two years with Misys. At the age of 46, having made herself financially secure with the sale of her company, Rogers decided to retire. She had recently got married, had two stepsons as well as her own son to look after and was looking forward to a quieter, more relaxed life.

It lasted eight weeks. It was only that long because it was the summer holidays.

'It was the lack of mental stimulation that did for me.' And then the phone rang. VC giant 3i, which had backed her initial MBO, was looking for a new non-exec. It was perfect. Since that call her second career as a non-exec chairman ('And it is chairman, none of that 'chair' nonsense.') has snowballed.

With four non-exec chairmanships currently, and some seven more on her CV, Rogers' has found her new life in the last 6 years to be every bit as satisfying and demanding as her first career. And every bit as successful. She recently orchestrated the buy out of one company. 'This was my first 'soup-to-nuts' deal. I brought in the funding. We bought the company cheaply on a P/S of 0.3, brought in a new management team, re-positioned the company into outsourcing, and just sold it for a 700% profit. That was a nice deal'.

When asked what the secret of success is, Rogers lists three things to look at: 'First, and definitely foremost, is the management team. You have to have the right people - or at least think that you can bring in the right people.

'Then it is the market. There must be a market opportunity. The business must be in a market that has the potential for growth.

'And finally there has to be something different about the company - a differentiator. I see a lot of business plans that frankly I just don't get. And if I don't get it in the first two pages of the business plan, then I am not going to be interested. You see a lot of three-inch thick plans because, for some reason, people think you have to fill them with all this stuff. Well I can tell you that if you haven't sold it in the first couple of sides, no one is going to read any further.'

As a woman in a man's world, Rogers thinks her sex has helped her. 'At least people tend to remember you,' but refuses to play the gender politics game. 'There are successful women and successful men. The women who don't succeed are those that try to be successful men. If there is a glass ceiling then I have certainly never encountered it.'

She does think that women have some advantages as non-execs. 'As a non exec you have no power, only influence. Well women are better at using their influence to get what they want. If I go to meet a CEO they are less likely to be threatened by a woman, it is less of an alpha-male thing. If they don't feel threatened then you can get a lot more done.'

Having tried retiring once there doesn't seem any chance that Rogers is going to walk away from her successful and challenging life any time soon. And for the companies, their shareholders and employees that can't be anything but for the best.

Ben Rooney is a freelance business journalist. Ben can be contacted at ben@benrooney.com

Tina Rogers - bio
Tina has 35 years experience in technology companies. She is a highly successful and enthusiastic professional NXC. Her experience includes several MBO’s, company acquisitions and sales, turnarounds, fund raising. Having vast wealth of practical board experience from small private company through to FTSE listed Plc. Until 1998 she was MD of a Misys company, which she had sold to them 2 years earlier. Since that time and over the last 6 years Tina has held multiple Chairmanships and specializes in leading the growth of software companies, both organically and by acquisition. Her experience ranges from a Software Gaming start-up to the largest UK Software Distributor. Tina is well respected in the investor community having carried out various transactions over the last few years including MBO's/MBI's, Acquisitions, Exits and Investments. She has worked with 3i, RBS, BOS., Dunedin, Albany and several VCT’s. Tina is a past winner of the Welsh Business Women of the Year award.