Nineteen Years!

We have now (incredible as it seems (as least to me)), arrived at the second anniversary of my departure from the Keystone team – and I am reminded that it is also the NINETEENTH anniversary of the day that I accepted a job offer from CCS IT (the company that created Keystone). On that day, in 1998, Keystone wasn’t even a ‘twinkle in the eye’ of the FOUR people who interviewed me – in FOUR separate interviews…

Having successfully negotiated three interviews in one visit, I was told that I needed to return the next day for the final, and probably most exacting assessment – to meet with the company’s formidable Belgian Director – Jan Maes. Yes – sure – I’d satisfied the Owner (Josh Warren), AND the MD – but nothing was going to be decided until Mr Maes had questioned me as to my technical prowess! If I had known then what I learned later about both his unparalleled technical knowledge and understanding, and the standards he set for earning his respect, I should probably have been even more nervous than I was as I walked through the door the next day at the then HQ, Abbotts Barn.

Of course, history shows that I survived Jan’s scrutiny, and joined, at that time, a rapidly growing band of professionals, providing IT consultancy and software development services to the company’s target market – the financial services sector. An intense period followed, as we played our part in countering the looming threat of the ‘Millennium bug’, and rode the wave of the Dot Com ‘bubble’.

My own projects at the time, for clients such as Norwich Union and Royal London Insurance were only briefly interrupted by a quick visit to London to take a look at a piece of social housing asset management software that a potential customer needed some help with – and for a couple of years, I (and most probably Jan also) had merely a passing interest in the somewhat alien initiative that began to gain a foothold back at ‘the Barn’.

By late 2002 my projects in The City drew to a natural close, and with, by then a raft of serious software testing experience under my belt, I was drafted in to lead the testing of the results of the endeavours of the social housing software team – Keystone v1. Six solid months were spent intensively examining every nut and bolt of functionality such as Forecasting, and Decent Homes – along the way inventing a set of test data that included the now famous ‘4 Kiwi Lane’ – and then we were ready to go out and sell!

Characteristic of IT people of course, is that they’d rather be surrounded by computers than people, and so there was no rush to volunteer for the job of software demonstrator – but with the extensive knowledge of the software’s workings that I had acquired, I was cajoled into the role of ‘Pre-Sales’ – not exactly the career path that I had envisaged for myself – but Josh and I hit the road nevertheless as the freshly formed ‘sales team’, with the giddy excitement, enthusiasm and nervousness typical of the exuberant company ‘start-up’.

Over the following months, as demonstrations flowed thick and fast, Josh and I honed the sales pitch – a pitch that had at its heart, the experience of nearly a decade of successfully selling to the Financial Services sector – winning business through referral, for gaining a reputation for quality, for honesty and integrity, and above all, for delivering a higher level of customer service than the customer even expected. What made the pitch all the more successful was that it was sincere – with the enthusiasm of evangelists we believed whole-heartedly in what we were selling – we were open and honest about Keystone’s strengths and weaknesses – and we would come away from pitches with a desire to win the business mainly because we felt that we could solve a problem for some people who were clearly in need of the kind of help we were offering.

And, as sales started to come in, we took on the Keystone implementations with the same level of zeal – determined to follow through on our promises, and build the business through reputation. We adopted the seemingly unique approach of offering an ‘unlimited implementation’, taking the view that successful implementation of Keystone were as important to us as they were to our customers. It paid off – it was rewarding to hear customers say “The difference with Keystone is that they tell you exactly what they will deliver – and then they do just that – and often more”.

Behind the scenes, Jan’s commissions in the City also came to an end, and he brought his exceptional technical skills to the social housing team – solving complex problems with a quiet but awesome efficiency. Over next few years, the Keystone product suite expanded rapidly, as we operated with a rapid turn-around of new solutions, benefiting from Jan’s unique ability to take a requirement described by those of us that sat in front of customers and potential customers, and to turn it into a high quality technical solution without the process bureaucracy that typically slows the output of software houses. Jan was the ultimate ‘Go-To’ guy – never stumped by a problem – always able to take the most complex of challenges and break it down into manageable and solvable chunks, with the reassuring, calm air of someone at the very top of his trade.

At the time, our business model seemed like common sense, business as usual – but looking back, it made us more unique than we realised. It propelled us from unknown to market leader in record time.

Over the next decade we went from strength to strength, with Josh unstinting in his daily insistence of the highest quality of customer service – and Jan hands-on in leading the development of innovative, and powerful, yet intuitive functionality. We fundamentally understood that our customers were our best advocates and sales force. It was the definitive win-win formula.

Ultimately, I went from software demonstrator, to salesman, to Client Relationship Director. This wasn’t the path that I had in mind as we entered the Millennium, but the title ‘Client Relationship Director’ was, for me, more important than the more obvious ‘Sales Director’ – it kept in focus the tenet that the RELATIONSHIP was key – both with existing and with potential new customers. It was so much easier to win new business when you could guarantee 100% customer satisfaction – a target that we evidenced by ALWAYS listing ALL of our customers on our web site.

This philosophy of gaining success and reward through delivery of customer satisfaction is one that I will always take with me – and apply to this day, now that I have gone solo. It stands me in good stead. But I have to thank Josh Warren for his visionary approach to creating Keystone and its values – and Jan Maes – not just for his technical brilliance and support, and inestimable intellect, but most of all for deciding to take me on that day in June, nineteen years ago. I was told recently, after he had died, that Jan “thought very highly” of me – and that is an accolade that I will treasure, and look upon as one of my greatest achievements. He was a great man, indeed.