Softcat's Martin Hellawell shook hands with all his employees, while QuantIQ's Stuart Fenton listens to music most of the day. We caught up with this duo, as well as eight other channel entrepreneurs, to find out what idiosyncrasies they feel are - or were - crucial to the success of their businesses
‘If I'm on cc, I don't read the email'
Entrepreneur: Mitchell Feldman
Credentials: Founder and CEO of Microsoft partner Cloudamour (which was acquired by RedPixie in 2015 before RedPixie was itself acquired by HPE in 2018). Currently holds WW marketing post at HPE.
Quirks: Ignoring emails that aren't explicitly for his attention, setting a destination for the business
"I've spent my whole career trying to make myself redundant. I've spent my life empowering people and creating processes so that the company was bigger than me, so I could be away from it and it continued to run. So much so that I got to fine-tune it to such a level that the day-to-day running of the business didn't need me at all.
"I did that to improve the value and efficiency of the business.
"The critical point was when my holidays weren't holidays. [That was when] I discovered that if I empowered all my staff to make decisions, I didn't need to be in front of every single email or decision, and that made it a better company. It created a better culture, more trust, less bureaucracy in the business, and people were more accountable for what they did. As a result we were a higher-performing team.
"My other habit which I'm religious with is if I'm on cc I don't read the email.
"As you get into a bigger company and get busier you can drown in emails, and a lot of people will habitually add me on cc as they think I need to know something, and I just don't have time. I was fighting my inbox so I took the decision that if I'm on cc I won't read the email. If you want it for me, make it for my attention.
"I was an email exemplar. What I mean by that is lots of people aren't very good with email; they will reply to an email that's an old subject about a different subject. So I was always very meticulous when I sent emails that the subject line was never cryptic or off piste. I want to speed read my emails, so just by having the subject line on point is incredibly helpful for me to become efficient.
"My one last point is that I always had a vision of what the future looked like. Having that positive visualisation helped me get to where I wanted to go. A lot of entrepreneurs are fighting each battle, but don't have an endgame or destination. I had a very clear vision of what my destination looked like and my constant world was looking at the delta between where I was and where I needed to be. That was the exit. The exit was to build a large, sustainable business that ran outside me being in it every day, had a great market reputation, was the go-to partner - all the stuff you'd expect. I had a very clear vision of what my tomorrow looked like."
Click onto the next page for former Lanway MD Andrew Henderson's quirks...
