My diary this month is dominated by our submission for the tenth iteration of the G-Cloud framework. This is a government purchasing framework which has been running since 2012 and has been extremely successful for us to date we ve won more than £13m in contracts!

Traditional public sector tenders are hard work for small businesses, and you often have to question whether it’s worth investing the time in responding. There are endless forms to fill in and hoops to jump through to demonstrate that your business meets specific standards and is financially viable.

However, frameworks such as G-Cloud have made things much easier for both suppliers and potential purchasers.

They were developed to help the public sector benefit from the creativity and agility of SMEs while reducing procurement costs thus providing better value for taxpayers and we ve found them a very effective way of winning work.

Some of our business comes through suggesting to customers who aren?t already using the framework that they look at it when buying new IT services. We re effectively using it as a marketing tool.

This raises the question of why it’s taking so much of my time this month, particularly now that G-Cloud is on its tenth iteration. There are two reasons. Firstly, after frequent iterations with as little as five months between versions, Crown Commercial Services, who run the framework, appear to have settled on an annual framework update cycle.

We re in a fast-moving industry, so we need to make sure we re offering services that public sector organisations actually need. The framework cycle gives us the incentive to step back and take a strategic look at how the market has changed since the last iteration.

Examples are the growing popularity and falling costs of public cloud services (which we also offer), and what services are generating the most interest. For example, we ve decided that it’s increasingly difficult to define where ?back up” ends and ?disaster recovery” starts, so this time round we ll be offering a data security and recovery service that combines both.

We also look at solutions that we ve developed for specific customers to see if they can be offered as a generic service. The chances are that if one organisation has a particular issue, other organisations will have the same problem, so why should they reinvent the wheel if we can offer them a tried and tested solution” This led to the development of our Identity Management as a Service offer, which provides single sign-in to all an organisation’s services through the cloud.

Second, it’s vital that we re extremely clear and accurate with the descriptions of our services. The framework is like a catalogue, and customers either buy what you’ve defined, or they don’t buy anything.

Customers can also compare everyone in the market, which means your service has to be both compelling and correctly priced. You may be on the framework but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get any business you’re just in the catalogue. So, I?ll be working closely with our technical consultants to review and refresh our service descriptions and ensuring that our services are competitively priced.

These frameworks are by no means perfect, and they still involve a lot of work. But they?re a much better way of handling public sector procurement than the alternatives which is why G-Cloud is high on my agenda this month.

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The recent collapse of Carillion reminded all of us of the dangers of debt. Apparently, its debts grew by more than 50 percent in its last four months of trading, and it also had a huge pension deficit. However, another type of debt can be just as insidious technical debt for IT systems and services.

We hear about examples in the NHS, where systems that hadn?t been upgraded for years were caught up in last year’s ransomware attacks, and we see it regularly at customers who have minimised IT investment over the past few years or are tied into outsourcing contracts supporting outdated IT systems that no longer meet their needs.

I was interviewed by a journalist on this topic a couple of weeks ago incidentally while away on holiday, illustrating that when you run a business you’re never out of reach.

The interview reminded me that it’s becoming a growing problem, as most businesses are now dependent on technology for critical business functions. But, like financial debt, it’s something that people don’t want to talk about, as they don’t want to admit that their organisation might be falling behind.

For most organisations, technical debt is the accumulation of a series of business decisions, normally taken in isolation. Each was perfectly valid at the time but was frequently made without considering its effect on other systems and an organisation’s overall IT architecture, creating an unnecessarily complex IT infrastructure.

This limits performance, scalability and particularly agility – a major problem in today’s fast-changing digital world. It also takes a lot of internal resource and cost to maintain and manage.

Organisations are frequently dependent on bespoke or heavily customised applications that do the job but are complex and difficult to change and become ?part of the way we do things round here . They don’t make it onto the radar until they fail spectacularly, or you try to migrate them to your new operating system, by which time the person who implemented them is long gone and you find that they?re written in outdated code on an obsolete platform.

Another aspect of avoiding technical debt is spotting where an undocumented script, work-around or quick fix could become a liability, by ensuring well-enforced change control and management processes.

We ve benchmarked this across a range of organisations and found that by optimising their IT infrastructure, replacing or upgrading outdated legacy systems and managing licensing and capacity most organisations can save up to 25 per cent of their annual IT budget. It’s a significant saving, and something well worth exploring.

As with financial debt, the first step is to understand the problem. Your IT team and systems are there to serve the needs of the business they are not an end in itself. Review and work out what services your business needs, not that it thinks it wants, and then decide what systems you need to support them and what you can consolidate, simplify or turn off.

Once that’s done, understand which services can usefully be provided via cloud, which are better off outsourced to a third party, and which to retain in-house.

As a replacement for a bespoke system running on an outdated operating system, which was costing them a considerable sum in both third party maintenance and in-house staff to support it, one of our customers took the approach of asking us to implement a replacement based on commercial, off the shelf software as much as possible.

Whilst they had to make minor changes to existing business processes to fit the way the new application worked, they gained significantly increased functionality, plus easier, simpler and cheaper integration with complimentary applications.

They have also minimised their potential for complications and made it much easier to keep up to date as well as ensuring it can easily be supported by third parties. Minimising the need for bespoke IT is a very effective way to reduce the risk of technical debt.

Another customer, an engineering joint venture working on one of the enabling contracts for HS2, decided that cloud was the best route to take. Each of the companies in the joint venture had different IT systems, making collaboration difficult.

Rather than create something bespoke, which would have to be maintained and updated, they decided to have a dedicated Office 365 domain for the project in the Microsoft cloud. They simply have to pay for what they use, while users always have access to the latest version of all the Office applications and receive updates as soon as they?re released.

Every organisation will have different business needs and require different IT solutions. Some legacy systems may be unavoidable, but the more you can standardise and simplify, the lower your risk of falling into technical debt.

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One of my resolutions this year was to increase my use of social media for business. I’ve been on both Twitter and LinkedIn for a long time, but my posting has been somewhat spasmodic. A combination of encouragement and nagging from our marketing manager has reminded me of my responsibilities. Although we make regular posts on our company Twitter feed and LinkedIn page, my personal profile reaches a different audience, ranging from industry contacts I’ve made over 25+ years in the business to journalists and friends.

As well as sharing my own articles including these columns and those my colleagues in Fordway write, I aim to highlight interesting developments in the IT sector and comment about their significance. As I’ve mentioned in previous diary entries, I read a lot of industry newsletters and management books, which give me plenty of material. One recent article I shared was the news that the government is increasing its IT spending with SMEs, one of which is Fordway.

However, social media for business is a double-edged sword. It can damage your reputation much more quickly than it can raise your profile, and it’s also increasingly being exploited by hackers and those with malicious intent. Potential problems range from malware embedded within links and images to social engineering using the data you’ve provided online through your social media profile to attack your business.

Most people are well aware that links and attachments within emails can be a source of viruses and phishing attacks, so use tools such as spam filters and treat emails from unknown sources with extreme care. However, social media can be something of a cyber ?blind spot?. Many people aren’t aware that it can be used as a delivery mechanism for ransomware in a similar way to email. Researchers have claimed that a new automated spear-phishing framework which targeted Twitter users had a success rate of between 30 percent and 66 per cent, perhaps because people don’t treat links within tweets with the same level of caution as email attachments.

Images can also be a security risk. Those with malicious intent have found a way to embed ransomware code into images which they then post on social media. So when using Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites it’s important to avoid clicking on and downloading image files that appear without pictures, as they could launch ransomware attacks on your devices.

When you’re busy it’s easy to be caught out. You see an article that looks plausible and of interest to your customers and quickly share it. However, retweeting content that contains malware or links to questionable content can soon undermine your authority. We all have a duty of care to our contacts and need to make sure that we’re sharing trusted content.

Social engineering is another issue that’s caught many people out including those who are otherwise technically savvy. Many people don’t realise how much information they give out through their LinkedIn profiles, Twitter conversations and Facebook pages, which can then be used against them. A busy user might easily respond to a carefully crafted phishing email that seems to originate from senior management without realising it is not what it seems.

The ultimate example of this is a sanctioned penetration test where security experts used fake Facebook and LinkedIn profiles pretending to represent a smart, attractive young woman to penetrate the defences of a US government agency with a high level of cybersecurity awareness. It demonstrates that social engineering attacks can be effective against even the most technically sophisticated organisations.

This doesn’t mean organisations should be frightened of social media. Each organisation is different and has a different appetite for risk. Thankfully, most now understand that cyber risk is a business issue for the board, not an IT issue, and is approached and funded as an organisational priority. It is important that all risks, including social media, are considered. A comprehensive risk analysis will identify vulnerabilities, how likely they are to happen and the impact if they do. Each organisation can then put in place the appropriate policies and technology to protect its most essential assets.

With social media in particular, the key to protecting your organisation is user education training everyone about the threats, so that they know what to beware of and what to do should the worst happen. One very effective policy which we’ve implemented is to have security champions in all departments. This ensures security is embedded in day-to day activities and reminds everyone of their security responsibilities, while sharing knowledge and best practice and providing a channel for feedback.

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January is traditionally the time when people look at what has worked well for their business in the previous year and focus on what needs to be improved. One of the areas our leadership team has been reviewing is our business messaging. Is it still relevant to what we do” And can we simplify it to make it easier for potential customers to understand what we do?

It’s important that business messaging works for our staff as well as for the external audience. When a company gets beyond a certain size it can be difficult for people to see the big picture of their organisation’s activities because each have their own immediate priorities and are focused on one specific area.

However, aligning everyone behind the same messages is crucial if you want to gain traction with a target audience. Almost everyone in an organisation, from the sales team to service desk staff, has regular contact with customers. Each occasion is an opportunity for them to say something about the business and to give the customer a better understanding of the full scope of what a company does.

My area of expertise is IT, not communications, so I’ve been doing some research into what the experts say. Apparently, you have to say things seven times before people ?get it?. You also can’t just assume that they understand what you mean, but need to regularly check that they?ve taken it on board.

We ve changed direction significantly and now have job titles that simply didn?t exist two years ago. So, as well as our newer recruits understanding their role, we need our long-serving members of staff to be on board with how we ve changed.

Fordway has a long-established tradition of quarterly company meetings, which include a report on how the company is doing and an explanation of the direction we re taking. As a management team, we ve been looking at how we use this forum more effectively, taking time to ensure the content is right and that the format encourages staff to use it as an opportunity to ask us questions.

It takes a little preparation, but it pays dividends. This sort of meeting helps people to understand where they fit into the picture and how they contribute to the business. But not everyone feels comfortable speaking out in a group situation so it’s important we nurture a company culture where staff can seek clarification at any time.

Facebook Messenger Broadcast: A hole in the head for social’s GDPR challenge

Facebook’s latest innovationcalled Messenger Broadcast would allow businesses to send out messages without being asked a question first ?A GDPR nightmare

Avoid the PowerPoint slides

Of course, part of communication and ultimately the art of persuasion is all about storytelling. As busy managers it’s very tempting to dust off and update a deck of PowerPoint slides, but I know that this approach bores me personally. If you can use some relevant anecdotes to clarify the sort of conflict you face or the type of problem to be overcome, people engage on an emotional level. Suddenly, they aren?t just looking at the facts and figures. Their brains have engaged, and they are far more likely to remember the message long after the meeting.

The analogy I’ve found most helpful is that everyone uses taps to get water. The water company doesn’t need to specialise in different sectors they provide water to everyone who needs it. Similarly, every organisation needs an effective, efficient and optimised IT infrastructure, whether it’s run internally, via a contract with a service provider or in the cloud. These days IT is indistinguishable from the business, and everyone expects it to be available whenever and wherever they need it. Our job is to make that happen.

In the past we ve organised the sales team around vertical sectors public sector, finance, construction, media, etc. But I’ve realised that our skills and expertise are not vertical, but apply to every industry and market sector. Our target customers are defined by the size, complexity and importance of their IT operations rather than their industry.

Another thing I like to do is to test people on our business messaging particularly the sales team, who?re our frontline ambassadors. If they can’t explain what we do clearly and succinctly, we ll struggle to win new business.

Communications is an important skill for a managing director. It may not be the one that comes most naturally to me, but like anything else it can be learnt. With the support of my leadership team and marketing department, effective communications is one of our priorities for 2018.

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One of the challenges we all face as leaders is turning strategies into practice and it’s particularly difficult when it comes to company vision and values. It’s all too easy for this to be seen as an exercise in communications rather than something that impacts the way we all work day to day.

We were determined that this wouldn?t happen to us, as we believe our vision and values are essential to the growth of our business and should frame everything that we do. So we refined them into some key behaviours that everyone at Fordway me included should exhibit. As we did this, and reviewed the values with staff across the company, we also made some small changes to the wording of the values themselves to ensure that they more accurately stated the messages we wanted to convey.

To embed this in the company, we are implementing score cards which are data focused. When we review individual performance, we now have to provide factual evidence of how we ve delivered against these values and behaviours. Getting staff focussed on how they live the values to deliver their objectives should help us to embed the culture and behaviours in day-to-day practice.

The vision and values approach

Our three values are deliver great results, stronger together and adapt and thrive.

“Deliver great results” is self-evident if we don’t do this, we won’t be in business very long. It’s supported by two behaviours which explain how our staff can help us achieve this: be decisive, and take responsibility for your own actions. We encourage and empower everyone to make decisions, particularly when other people depend on them. If they need support or advice we ask them to provide options and possible answers rather than just ?passing the monkey” to a colleague or manager.

By taking responsibility, we expect people to fulfil their role and achieve their targets. However, everyone is human and we understand that at times they may need to ask for help. To make this work, we ask them to clearly state what they need so that as a team we can deliver our commitments to our customers.

Our second value, “stronger together”, emphasises that we can achieve far more working collectively than any of us can individually. So while we expect people to do their job well, as already stated, everyone has different skills and we ll only succeed if we work together towards a common goal. So we celebrate the team first, and don’t take advantage of our colleagues.

We ve defined a second behaviour alongside being a team player: “be positive “, which we define by the phrase we say “yes and… This isn’t just about going the extra mile, although we value that and have introduced awards to recognise it such as employee of the month. It means being confident and expert in your area, but not bluffing if you don’t know the answer; checking for understanding, questioning assumptions and get directly to the point so that we don’t waste anyone’s time. We re well known for our straight talking and our customers regularly tell us that they appreciate this.

This leads us into our third value: “adapt and thrive” which is about learning from both our successes and our mistakes. We aim to do everything right first time, but Fordway’s value to our customers is based on implementing and supporting new and difficult technology, dealing with uncertainty and taking calculated risks. So despite the best of intentions we may make imperfect decisions and mistakes can happen. As Albert Einstein once said, anyone who’s never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

What’s important is to learn from our mistakes and ensure that they aren?t repeated. We don’t believe in finger-pointing or a blame culture. If there’s a problem, we identify it and work together to find a solution. We succeed or fail as a team; we don’t throw our colleagues or business partners under the bus to protect ourselves.

This may all sound like common sense, but to succeed we need to have competitive advantage, and ours has always been our people and our experience. So we celebrate success, learn from our mistakes and continue to innovate. So far, it seems to be working.

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Since coming back from holiday I seem to have spent most of my time talking to customers about IT complexity. For some it’s the increasing complexity of the IT decisions they face what services to move to cloud, if any, how to prepare for the new data protection legislation (GDPR) or how best to handle increasing cyber security threats.

For others it’s how to get the most from their current IT infrastructure, which is probably much more complex than they need.

This IT complexity is normally as a result of a series of business decisions taken over many years, each one valid in itself and made on the basis of a strong business case but with little thought given to its effect on the organisation’s overall IT environment. The resulting complexity, managed by their IT team, consumes a vast amount of internal resource and cost whilst delivering very little real business benefit.

Before answering their questions, I remind them that IT infrastructure doesn’t provide value to a business. It’s only there to support three things: the business specific applications and data to run operation, the business process improvements that can be implemented more effectively using IT and the information and insights that can be gained from the data the organisation retains. The infrastructure they run on must simply be fit for purpose and work effectively.

IT infrastructure is like the plumbing in your house. It needs to support the services you want in the locations where you want them, from your power shower to your washing machine. But as long as it works, you rarely give it a second thought. However, if you keep adding new services, it will become increasingly complex and you?ll start to get problems such as lower water pressure.

Complexity also costs money. When we carried out benchmark studies across a range of organisations, we found that optimising IT infrastructure can save an organisation up to 25 per cent of its annual IT infrastructure budget.

So when someone asks me how to simplify their IT, I don’t immediately recommend new equipment or handing everything to a cloud provider. Instead, I suggest that they take a step back and consider what IT needs to do to support their business. Only when they understand that can they work out what’s right for their organisation.

This may sound somewhat counterintuitive when we offer, among other services, IT infrastructure! However, we ve built our reputation on being an impartial trusted advisor, not a ?box shifter?. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to ask the difficult questions why are you doing things this way, what do your users really need and where are the pain points?

The best solution may be a short consultancy project, helping a customer review what they have and how to run it more efficiently. I?m always surprised at how many organisations have Microsoft desktop services but aren?t using the associated management tools effectively, and a review of applications and licences can almost always generate cost savings.

With one customer we found that it had installed new software but it wasn?t being used, so wasn?t providing the expected benefits. Another wasn?t aware of a vendor’s licensing policy for a specialist, expensive application. It had bought a licence for every user that required access without realising the licence was actually per concurrent user it had 300 users but a quick analysis showed only 100 would ever be using it at the same time. We also had to point out that the vendor’s salesperson, who gets commission on the amount of licences sold, wasn?t actually the best person to advise them on this.

This also applies to cyber security start by ensuring that you’re doing the basics right, using an assessment such as the government’s Cyber Essentials scheme, before spending a fortune on new technology. Chances are you have most of the security software you need; some integration, configuration assistance and better reporting is more likely to help than buying yet another one.

This may not be how people imagine the MD of an IT company spends his day, but as with many other things the 80:20 rule applies. Some 80 per cent of my time is spent in an advisory role, and only 20 per cent talking about the nuts and bolts of technology fascinating though it is. It’s all about our core purpose, what can we usefully do to help our customers achieve better results, faster.

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Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter whether you’re cyclists or not.

On Sunday 30 July, I joined thousands of other cyclists and three of my colleagues for the Ride London event, covering a 100-mile route from central London into the Surrey Hills and back again following the 2012 Olympic road cycling route.

Our aim was both to challenge ourselves and to raise money for local charity Eikon, which provides long-term support to some of Surrey’s most vulnerable young people.

I believe goal-setting is important in life as well as in business. I like to set myself a personal physical challenge each year, as I find that setting a specific goal helps me to focus on what I?m doing and there’s a lot of enjoyment in both achieving my goal and in raising money for a good cause.

It also keeps my rather battered ex-rugby player’s joints moving and helps keep my ever-expanding waistline in check! We ve been supporting Eikon for around 18 months now, and everyone in the office has got involved in raising money, which has really helped with team building. It’s not all about sport we ve also had cake sales, which are very popular, and two of our staff confronted their fears and abseiled down Guildford Cathedral earlier this year to support them.

Last summer we sponsored our own cow, ?Ermincloud , as part of Surrey Hills Cow Parade, part of the world’s largest public art event. She raised a lot of money in a public auction and is now a feature in Godalming outside our offices.

Ride London came just after the end of the Tour de France, which I followed with great interest. For me it’s the psychology of cyclists that is particularly fascinating.

The cyclists have to keep themselves going more or less every day for 3,500km over three weeks. They prepare by putting themselves through a brutal training regime and display levels of dedication, stamina and endurance which the rest of us can only aspire to.

But whilst physical fitness, physiology and skill play a significant part in their success, you can’t underestimate the psychological factors of motivation, confidence and self-belief when completing the sporting world’s most arduous event.

Completing a single mountain stage of the Tour de France last year as part of the riders in L?Etape du Tour, again raising money for Eikon, gave me a small insight into just how gruelling the full event must be. You have to manage your personal energy and fight past fatigue and pain to reach the finish line.

The same psychological focus will be recognisable to any business owner. Maintaining momentum is crucial. And in both business and sport, having the right network, team and support helps us to sustain the psychological drive needed for success.

In my charity ride I was pleased with my personal time but I?m well aware that this was partly due to cycling as part of a group, which allowed me to expend less energy.

Riding in a peloton allows cyclists to benefit from drafting, and when done well they can save up to 27 per cent in wind resistance compared to those riding individually.

Marginal gains can make all the difference, as the British Cycling team famously demonstrated with their success at the 2012 Olympics. One tenth of a second improvement may be all it takes to win a race, so it’s all about using data analytics to identify where those gains can be made.

The situation in business is similar: using data analysis and working out how and where we can make small gains to drive incremental improvement.

At Fordway we re currently implementing new systems to give us better visibility of key metrics, so that everyone can monitor progress and be accountable for their own performance.

Breaking down a problem into bite-sized pieces also makes it easier to solve. Setting a manageable but challenging goal, making small changes, reviewing performance and then improving again is the most effective way to move forward. Focusing your team in this way is well proven in both the sporting and business arenas.

I?m no Tour de France cyclist, but my annual personal challenge allows me to push myself beyond my comfort zone, and I was delighted when colleagues agreed to support me as part of a company team.

We all trained hard, but there are always things that are outside your control. One colleague is a dedicated cyclist but found to his dismay that his hip wasn?t going to oblige on the day and had to withdraw part way through the race.

These sorts of things happen and it can be devastating at the time, but until you challenge yourself you never know what you can achieve. The key is to learn what you can and can’t control, fix it wherever possible and, to quote Winston Churchill, ?keep buggering on?.

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As schools break up for the summer holidays you?d think it would be a quiet time for the sales team. What’s the point in calling or emailing if the people you” want to speak to won’t be at their desk for two or three weeks” However, I’ve found that holidays are actually a good time to sell, whatever sector you work in.

If the person you’re calling isn’t away, they?re likely to be less busy than usual and also more relaxed, particularly if they?ve recently returned from their own holiday, so they?ll have more time to speak to you. Granted, a few will have taken on extra work for colleagues who are on holiday so won’t have time for a chat, but a quick question will enable you to assess the situation and respond accordingly.

Most people, when time allows, are only too pleased to have an opportunity to talk about their work and the challenges they face. The role of a good sales person is to listen, ask the right questions and learn not go in straight away with a hard sell. Selling is all about knowledge and if you have the opportunity to find out more about a prospect, you need to grasp it with both hands.

We ve been in this business 25 years and I estimate collectively our team have attended over 10,000 client meetings in this time. In the vast majority of these cases, what the client thought they wanted, or what the salesperson originally felt might be the optimal solution before the meeting, was not what the client actually needed or bought.

The summer holidays?window isAlso a good time to get out and about for meetings, as roads and trains are less crowded. So I encourage my team to make the most of it, and of course it’s something I do myself. Sales is a key part of my role and I like to think I?m quite good at it. That’s probably because I?m always happy to discuss technology and how businesses can use it, as well as the new stuff that’s coming along.

You need to understand your customer’s pain points before you offer him or her a solution. One of the events we find most useful is the bi-annual IT Directors” Forum, where suppliers and IT directors are marooned on a boat for three days with a mix of formal meetings and informal chats over meals and into the evenings. It’s the best way to find out about the issues that really matter to the businesses we re hoping to sell to, as well as speak more generally about economic issues such as the impact (or otherwise) of Brexit.

Another important aspect of successful selling is to study customers” habits. You need to put your preconceptions aside and think differently in order to be successful. It starts with having an open, enquiring mind, particularly for the high value, high risk, business to business environment we serve. Until you fully understand the issue or problem the customer is looking to solve, plus the context, dependencies and their risk appetite, you are never going to be able offer constructive advice or an appropriate answer.

One thing we re very keen on at Fordway is what I call eating your own dog food . It’s an expression that always raises groans in the office but it’s been used in the software community for some time. It describes a company that uses its own products, showing its confidence in them and testing them in real-world usage. Apparently it goes back to 1970s TV advertisements, with some pet food company executives saying on screen that they fed their products to their own dogs and another even eating a can of his company’s dog food at shareholder meetings. It’s the diametric opposite of the expression cobbler’s children go barefoot?.

So the serviceswe recommend to our customers are those that we already use within Fordway and we fully understand, warts and all. Our corporate IT service is a client of our managed cloud service, which uses exactly the same platform, processes and support and offers the same SLA that we offer our customers. We use a wide range of technologies to deliver cloud services, and use and endorse ITIL service management processes which align IT with the needs of the business.

Information security is now critical, it actually always has been, and so in addition to ISO27001 which we ve held and maintained for years, we recently obtained certification to the government’s Cyber Essentials Plus standard. This provides further assurance to our customers that we maintain the highest standards of security, and we now recommend it to our customers to help them reduce the risk of cyber-attack.

So my tip is to use the summer holidays as an opportunity to get to know your customers and prospects better, which will bear dividends throughout the rest of the year. And if you can demonstrate the quality of your company’s products or services as part of your daily business life, so much the better.

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Getting the mix right between introducing innovative new services and focusing on what is working well and meets our customers” current requirements, is a constant balancing act. So last week we were delighted when Fordway was included in a list of ?1000 Companies to Inspire?, published by the London Stock Exchange Group. This suggests that we must be doing something right.

The report points out that fast growing, dynamic SMEs which I?m sure describes many of the companies featured in Founders Diaries tend to grow through innovation, either offering new services or reimagining the provision of existing business models.

That’s certainly how we operate, constantly looking for innovative technologies and challenger brands that will enable our customers to be more effective and competitive, whatever their sector. It’s reflected in one of our company values adapt and thrive.

Last month I spent a lot of time working with our consultancy team developing four new services for submission to the ninth iteration of the government’s G-Cloud framework, which provides a catalogue of accredited cloud IT services for UK government and other public sector organisations.

It meant some long days working out what businesses needed in the light of changing legislation such as the new Global Data Protection Regulation, defining our offer in the very specific format that’s required when completing public sector tenders and then submitting it by the Easter deadline.

All this of course while continuing with business as usual for our existing clients. The good news is that we ve just received confirmation that all of the new services have been accepted, and will be available alongside our existing cloud services.

The framework was set up to help SMEs compete with much larger suppliers for public sector contracts and enable the public sector to benefit from their innovation and agility. It’s certainly been advantageous for us, enabling us to win a number of contracts which we would not have been eligible for previously. We ve also learned a lot from working alongside much larger IT suppliers. So despite being a time-consuming process, it’s something we ll continue to do, while making sure that our offer is continually refreshed and updated.

The other key aspect of innovation is that you have to be able to identify when something is not working. This is something that companies such as Amazon are masters of what’s often described as experiment often and fail fast?. We need to be brave enough to try new things but smart enough to understand when they?re not working and it’s time to move on.

Few business decisions are black and white. Due to time pressures and business need you typically have to make them based on incomplete information. For us the key is to make the decision but then regularly check on progress and relevance.

If it is obvious that something is struggling, or that the commercial acceptance is not there, make the decision quickly to stop and focus your efforts on the next idea. It’s also possible that it’s a great idea but the timing is wrong. Whilst we introduced four new services into the new framework, we also withdrew three services which had not proven commercially viable to free resources to work on our more compelling offerings.

At the same time as innovating, however, it’s important that we continue to offer the core services that Fordway has been built on. We take the same approach as when we re-defined our company vision and values last year keeping the good stuff that made us what we are today, while recognising and stopping anything that could hold us back.

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This month I’ve spent a lot of time out and about with our sales team as part of a company-wide initiative to prioritise understanding and delighting?through improved customer focus.

It all stems from the review of our company values, which I discussed in my December post. One of the three values we agreed on was Adapt and thrive , which ensures that we continually look for new ways to address the issues we and our clients face.

For me, that meant having a better understanding of our customers” evolving requirements. A lot of my time is spent on defining where Fordway is going and why, and ensuring that all our staff and partners fully understand what this means for them and what we require of them.

I need to know as much as possible about the issues our customers are facing so we can develop better services whether that’s improving the way we do things or searching out innovative technology from new, disruptive companies. It also gives me a better sense of how well we re performing and where we need to improve, which links to another of our values, ?great results every time .

To make this happen, I’ve committed to setting aside one day a week when members of our sales team can take me to meetings with current and potential customers. They?ve been quick to take me up on it, which in recent weeks has taken me around the country from Bristol to Leeds and most points in between.

Customers have responded positively as they see it as adding value to what we provide to them, particularly if they?d like another opinion on issues which are strategically important to their organisation. After 25 years in the industry, I’ve probably seen most issues before and can often help with the challenges they are facing.

Some of the needs we ve uncovered through the customer focus are already feeding through into new product and service offerings, such as a new cloud phone service hosted from our data centres to complement our existing cloud desktop services.

We ve also introduced a way of automatically identifying and backing up information saved across an entire organisation’s mobile devices, controlled from a central point, so that if the worst happens and the device is lost or stolen, all that information isn’t lost too. It also greatly assists with ensuring organisations are compliant with the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which come into force in May 2018 and carry significant penalties for businesses and their leaders if breached.

Based on these discussions we ve also restructured our sales team and added new roles to help us improve our customer service. Maintaining growth is all about winning new business from prospective and current customers if we re going to achieve our growth targets the new business team need to keep their focus on their prospects rather than sorting out customer queries with orders already fulfilled. But they could only do that if they knew someone else was doing that job. So we ve added an internal customer services team to work alongside them to handle customer enquiries, on-boarding new customers, incidental add-on sales and contract renewals to ensure all the small but vital details are taken care of properly.

We ve also invested in customer service awareness training for everyone in Fordway to ensure we all understand what’s important to our customers and our teams have the skills and autonomy to deliver what they need.

We re already seeing results from this improved focus, from contract renewals to new business wins. Based on more regular contact with our customer services team and regular conversations with them, one of the customers I met recently, and who previously only used us to install new hardware, has now appointed us to host and run their IT service for all their offices across the UK. We ve also won a small but significant contract with a construction joint venture through nurturing relationships with key individuals as they?ve moved from one project to the next.

We re making sure I share these successes and others with everyone across the business, so they can see that all their hard work and the changes they?ve gone through are paying off.

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