Taking the Mike
Mike Norris - experienced, savvy and in charge of the UK's largest reseller. In the first of a two-part interview, Computacenter's chief chats with Simon Meredith about mucking in, fun and winning.
Would you say Computacenter is different from other resellers?
reseller. In the first of a two-part interview, Computacenter's chief chats with Simon Meredith about mucking in, fun and winning. Yes, Computacenter is different. Unique is probably a strong word, but I'd say it is unique.
Why? What makes it unique?
I think it has a fun feel to it. It's informal for a company of its size and I think it has a culture of fun. It's dynamic and very fast moving.
Some people might be surprised to hear you say that. Is it possible to have fun supplying PC boxes to large corporate institutions?
Oh yeah - you can have fun doing anything if you try hard enough. Culturally, I think it is fun. We enjoy what we do. We succeed at what we do.
But Computacenter's image isn't really about fun? Look at your services document - corporate customers are quoted, but there are no jokes in it.
We're not making a joke out of it (the services document). It doesn't have to be humorous to be fun.
Enjoying what you do is fun, so I'd say it's more a culture of enjoyment than of fun. Work hasn't always got to be a laugh, but it is a game.
Do you tell that to your customers?
I don't put it that way exactly. It's a professional game, if you like, but it has got to be. The point I'm trying to make is, it's more than just a job.
So there's an internal culture of enjoying work and having fun doing it, but the presentation of that is whatever the customer wants it to be. Is that the case?
No, not whatever the customer wants it to be. But we do come across as a professional organisation. We present ourselves extremely well.
How do you instil that though?
Is it just a matter of picking the right people?
It is picking the right people and training them. We put a lot of effort into training, compared to most of our direct competitors - training for quality, not just to polish presentation skills. Whether it's sales or management training, we put a lot into it.
Do customers notice the difference? Do they comment on the difference between yourself and your competitors?
Yes they do. We don't always win, or at least we don't win enough.
We're aggressive for market share and I think, when we get it right, we win. In other words, when we get all our ducks in line, when we present ourselves well and get the right people involved, we win.
At our best we win, but if you have an off-day or are below par, there are plenty of other people ready to take the business away from you.
What do you expect staff at Computacenter to feel when they don't win?
Certainly inquisitive - they have got to know why. You can learn a lot from losing.
The first thing I learned from losing is that I didn't like it very much.
But you can find out why and invariably it comes down to poor account management.
Now that's not fun is it, losing the deal, I mean?
No, watching everyone else lose is fun - but that's a personal thing.
I'm known internally for it. Everybody likes to win apart from me. I like to watch everyone else lose.
I think we are quite aggressive and, you're right, it's not fun losing.
Sometimes you have to eat humble pie and you have to apologise to customers.
But equally, you have to remind people that you are still going to be there and that's one of the things, I think, that depresses the competition.
We do have the resources available to keep the pressure on accounts.
You said Computacenter is quite aggressive. Does that ever put people off?
Yes, it can do. Not necessarily the aggression - I think people want us to be hungry for their business and that's a good thing as long as you don't go over the top.
Sometimes you can come across as having all the answers - just a bit too slick, a bit too clever, a bit too good. That's a danger we can slip into from time to time.
Why do you take this reasonably aggressive approach to business?
I think you've got to. People expect you to want their business. It's certainly important when I buy.
What is the most common weakness in competitors when they pitch against you?
I think that sometimes they get the wrong people involved. They don't understand what the customer really wants.
There's a way to sell against Computacenter, you sell against its size - too large, too impersonal, doesn't care.
We sell on being the largest reseller and we're proud of that. There are some good competitors, but I think the majority would want to swap places.
One of your customers is quoted in a brochure as saying that you have a 'get on and do it' culture. Is that deliberate or has it evolved?
We're in a get-it-done industry. But we've got to get better. We are a fantastic organisation in a crisis. If the customer has a crisis we jump through hoops to fix things.
I'd like to be more active before the crisis and a lot of that is to do with confidence. Sometimes we underestimate our own ability, we underestimate how important we are to customers and how much we can help and do for them.
So you're saying it takes confidence to go to the customer and say what really needs to be done.
Absolutely. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
Most customers will say take an active role, but you have got to make sure you don't get too depressed if they ignore what you say because sometimes they do.
Do you think that's a fault of the industry? That resellers are reactive all the time?
I don't know. Let's face it, we're all busy. The majority of our customers are under pressure. I think it is easy for a customer to say we want you to come up with ideas.
It's difficult to change things radically, isn't it? So many of these organisations can be set in their ways, culturally and politically.
Not only that - practically as well. Some things look really simple from the outside but are extremely difficult.
Sometimes you find yourself up against corporate politics.
Do corporate customers understand what they can get out of IT and what approach they should take?
They understand distributed technology and they think it's a lot simpler than it actually is.
And by distributed technology you mean...
... Lans, infrastructure, PCs. Most users have some kind of device at home. Invariably, it's a standalone unit that works - they bought it, took it home, plugged it in, it worked.
They have no comprehension of why PCs take so long to install and so long to fix when they go wrong. The devil is in the detail.
There is nothing complicated about most PC infrastructure, it just seems complicated because it's heavy on detail.
Is IT high enough on the agenda at the moment in user organisations?
It varies from industry to industry, but I think IT is vital to most companies.
There is a level of frustration and the next guy you hire is not necessarily going to solve the problem. Don't get me wrong, this is typically the productivity user community.
There is a level of satisfaction with IT in terms of the project work - doing roll-outs to stores or going out to petrol stations or to pubs or building societies, things like that. Those big projects tend to work well.
Where the dissatisfaction exists is just pure productivity among users.
For instance, customers want to know why a PC takes two weeks to arrive.
Why does the network fall over itself? That's what I mean by dissatisfaction.
People just don't understand why it takes time - they need that communicated to them.
I will give you an example. It takes roughly four weeks to get a PC on a user's desk from the time of ordering. I can pick product off a warehouse shelf and put it in a van to despatch overnight in about 20 minutes. Getting my warehouse guys to pick quicker is not going to cut the four weeks down.
The problem is internal procurement requirements and that's more to do with the accept trial than anything to do with the PC technology.
So it is a business issue really?
Absolutely, and we are doing as much business consultancy work as IT consultancy.
You were not doing that five years ago, were you? Is the type of business you are doing changing?
No, we are still doing technical advice and guidance, but we are starting to do consultancy on managing the desktop, on the management issues around technology, not on the technology itself. That has changed.
How important is it to have an open relationship - sharing what you have to do to deliver the service that will meet customers' needs?
You need someone you can work well with. You certainly get a lot further if you can work with people because you are trying to achieve an objective.
There is caveat emptor in this business.
If I sell a customer a quarter of a million pounds worth of product at the margins we make, I might as well have not bothered if I upset him. Actually, we would probably get to a million quid and I still might as well have not bothered.
I have to keep customers for seven years to make it worthwhile getting them in the first place.
That's certainly the pitch I give the sales staff. If you don't, then it gets marginal.
So how can anyone or any reseller really be a success in this industry?
Those who do best in this industry are those who roll their sleeves up and get involved. They are the people who get close to the customer, close to the detail of the business and certainly close to the staff.
Those organisations that succeed definitely have that characteristic - Peter Rigby (CEO) does that at SCC, Neville Davis (chairman) does that at Compel.
The best resellers are those that understand their business better than anybody else. This is not an industry where you kick back - you get involved.'
INSIDE OUT
From the outside, it looks like Computacenter is moving towards the services side of the business, but Norris does not see it as a simple move away from products into services. The company is doing more work in areas like maintenance, but the product sales and the services are inseparable.
When financial analysts ask Norris to break down the mix between service and products, he says he can't do it because it is all part of the overall service the organisation provides.
There is the perception that the box is a Trojan horse, that you give a box away and you make the money on the bits. But that is not true, insists Norris. Computacenter makes money across the business and does best when it is able to integrate a range of services.
The real reason it makes money, says Norris, is that it makes a real difference for people in the organisation and because it retains customers for a long period of time. This is necessary, says Norris, because of the company's size.
He says Computacenter must keep a customer for at least seven years to make the business worthwhile.
In the area of maintenance, Computacenter has made progress because it has taken a different approach to the rest of the market. It re-engineered that part of the business about three years ago.
Computacenter had, Norris confesses, 'a bit of a nightmare on its hands' at the time. It lost quite a lot of money on maintenance and had to make a decision to stay on or get out. It chose to stay in and rebuilt itself from the bottom up. It is now particular about what it will and won't maintain. This, says Norris, is the key.
The dilution of maintaining equipment that is too expensive or difficult for the business is enormous. Computacenter sticks to a selected range of products and charges more for other contracts if it costs more to maintain those products. Or it simply does not maintain products on its own.
Computacenter, he says, has become adept at forming working relationships with vendors and at tailoring the service offering to what is cost effective.
WHAT CUSTOMERS REALLY WANT
Norris believes it's easy to define what the corporate customer wants.
You can, he says, get carried away in this industry, over-complicating things.
What most customers want from resellers is straightforward - they want to reduce their costs, increase their efficiency and employ technology in the most effective way.
Norris explains that the vast majority of IT departments and IT procurement people are not loved by the businesses they work for and need to feel the reseller is on their side.
Making your customers look good in the eyes of their users within the corporate organisation is, he comments, 'the greatest thing we can do - the rest is trivial'.
The IT manager of a large bank recently rang Norris to thank him for the work Computacenter had done for the bank - it had earned the IT manager a bonus. Norris says that's a real success story.