On the Edge

Stephen Brown (00:01)
Welcome to On The Edge brought to you by Elite Sales Edge with your host, Stephen Brown. In the series, Getting to Know Your CXOs, we'll be diving deep into conversations with various C -level executives. We'll explore the formidable challenges they encounter, the critical decisions they make, and the lessons that have left a lasting impact on them. Sit back and prepare to gain some insightful knowledge from the leaders who shape the business world.

Welcome to another episode of On the Edge. I'm your host, Stephen Brown, and this is part of our series called Getting to Know Your CXOs. Today our guest is Paul Butcher. Paul has over 35 years of experience in various technical leadership roles in high technology. He's held the post of president and chief operating officer of Mitel Networks Corporation from 2001 to 2011. Mitel was the largest Canadian IPO for a decade when the company went public in 2010.

Paul served as president at MapleSoft Group, an IT integrator, and has held numerous advisory and board positions. Paul co -founded Hosted Biz, a cloud IT company that saw prolific growth, became the fastest growing cloud vendor in the Canadian market. He also oversaw the acquisition of Hosted Biz by Opti9 Technologies, where he became CEO. Paul is a graduate of Reading College Technology in the UK. Welcome to the show, Paul. Great. Good to have us.

Really looking forward to it, Steve. Awesome. Well, I gave him the formals on who you are. If you want to take a few minutes to maybe give him the informal version of Paul. Well, that all sounds very good. I always get a kick when people say that I went to reading college as opposed to reading college. So it's good that good that you pronounced it correctly. But I mean, I am 44 percent Brit. That's it. So I've been in high tech since I left high school. So.

I've done lots of things, but some of the highlights you pointed out there are the big moments, certainly taking Mitel public. It was an enormous amount of work. And then prior to going public, we made a number of very, very large acquisitions on the path to get the company ready to go public. And then, you know, all the way through that, and then starting a company as a, you know, from the ground up is, was quite the difference from leading a 2000 employee organization. So,

It's good character building all around. Yeah, yes. So thanks Paul for taking time with us today. I know you're busy, but so let's jump right into this. The first question I have for you is what advice would you have for a person that's entering into their first C level role? What advice would you have for them to get off on the right foot? That's a great question. I think there's lots of ways to answer that and it depends on.

on what that transition is. So if you were a VP of an organization, you get promoted to CEO, it's a little different than if you're a recently recruited CEO into an organization you've got no experience with, right? So I think the way you would approach that's quite different, right? So the most likely is you're promoted into a C -level role. So I think...

In those circumstances, it's not about winning against your fellow employees. That's the first thing I would say. So if a bunch of candidates are being considered for that C -level role within the organization, and you ultimately are awarded that role, yeah, no gloating. At the end of the day, it's business as usual.

And obviously you need that management team to put in the same direction you to be successful. So that's, you know, that's the first thing I think it's, it's really important that your, you know, the, all your bridges with, with your management team are in place and, and you do everything from day one to build that back from, from where it is, particularly if a couple of the other individuals are disappointed. And I've been in that role myself and it's, it's difficult, right? You know, people question why you got the job, why they didn't get the job and,

better to have the conversation than let it stew. So, yeah, that's the first thing I would do. Obviously, if you've been promoted within an organization, you've already got a lot of ideas about what you would do, what changes you'd like to make, where the focus needs to be. So I think it's quite easy, to be honest, to just begin to put your hallmark on it with the rest of the team to create business progress.

Very different if you're coming from the outside in. So if you're recruited as a C -level executive into a new organization, like you've got a lot of work to do. You've got to meet with all the people that ultimately report in to you. You really should be meeting with the people that report in to all of them as well so that you're getting a very balanced view of what the issues are. And you're also making yourself open to it.

open to be an approach. So certainly culturally, I've always attempted to run a very open management team and feel anybody can call me, email me, I'll reply to any employee. So creating that culture is pretty important. So the only way to do that is to make sure you're out meeting lots of people. And then not to state the obvious, you really need to talk to as many customers as you can. There's no better.

temperature gauge of what the issues are than talking to all your customers. And you have to find a way to talk to them in such a way that that conversation is not being managed by somebody else in the company, because they'll try and manipulate the answer to you. If you want the truth from your customers, you really do. And if it's horrible, then it's horrible. You just got to deal with it.

Yeah, that's a consistent theme I hear from folks, whether they're a CEO, a CFO, COO, you know, they want unvarnished talk from people, right? They don't want to, you know, because they'll put their own filter on it over time after they hear enough things. But yeah, there's nothing worse than getting filtered, clean, processed information and, you know, half of it gets tossed out from the side. I think that's how... Yeah, and particularly if you're new to the role, because if you're new to the role...

I think the natural reaction for your leadership team is to tell you everything's all right. It's okay, I've got it under control, it's all good. They might well have it all under control, but you know what, take the time to make sure that the voice of the customer is really key. You touched on something that's a good segue into the second question. That's about building a team, having the right people around you.

on your leadership team is critical to the company's success and quite frankly, probably your own success. But what's your philosophy on building teams? When you're putting a leadership team together, what's your process for that? Well, I think the number one criteria is that you have to get the emotional and personality balance right across the team. It's kind of...

It's really more important than the core competence of each function that that team has. Because if you've got a team that's dysfunctional, it's going to have really slow results. And I think that what I've learned over the years is there are a lot of people in senior management that are type A type personalities. And type A personalities generally get attracted to other type A personalities.

because we'll go get it together and it's going to be great. And my experience is if you get a team of all type A's, you're going to head to disaster very, very quickly. So what you really need to do is you need to have a balance. You need some creative thinkers, you need some negative people. So you create that balance. And balance has got to be right because I've been on teams where everybody's negative.

Well, that's not a very happy place to be, but you really need to get that balanced. I think that emotional balance, like I said earlier, is probably more important than the absolute skill set they have for delivering the departments they run in. And you'll get a lot done. And of course, the other leadership challenge is to make sure that everybody's heard. So.

Because again, the type A's will take over the meetings and the introvert might have the best solution of what we're trying to solve and you got to get it out of them. That's true. That's a learning experience and you might not have to get it all out of them during a meeting with eight, 10 people in, but it doesn't stop you having corridor chats and so on with the people that are less willing to voice their opinion in a...

you know, in a more public way. Yeah, there's lots of good tools out there for that. I mean, the, you know, the basic like disc profile, you know, tools or what is it Myers -Briggs and all those it's important, right? You know, people, you have to get that right. Cause you're right. If you get a bunch of hard charging, you know, high D type A's, you know, if they're going to run everybody right off the cliff, you know, you need somebody to go, Hey, wait a minute. Have you thought about, yeah, I agree. And I remember going through an exercise with Myers -Briggs actually. And,

And people were proud because they were ENTJs, which is like falling off the scale because look, see, I'm the best here. Well, not necessarily. But it's, yeah, it's like, yeah, you got it. You need that balance because otherwise your decision making ultimately becomes massively optimistic. The will to succeed.

over overcomes the ability to deliver. Yeah, if you're in that stance, well, you just won't deliver. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's interesting, I've been out of the military some, gosh, 36, seven years, right. And even back then, it was clear, like when we built, you know, teams, your squads, you would purposely have a mix of people in there, we would do after actions reviews were constantly.

You know, okay, how did that go? What did we learn? How do we do it better? You know, constant improvement or consistent improvement, continuous improvement, however you want to put it. But it was never, it was never about the person. You know, it was about what we were trying to get done and how can we do it better? So I think the more companies spend time investing in that, investing in people, getting the right team put together, I think is critical. I also think that you don't, you know, not everybody has to agree because that's another dangerous.

management philosophy, right? It's like, well, the eight of us, but Billy there doesn't seem sold on it. So, let's not do it. Well, you need to work on Billy. If there's belief ultimately that it's the right thing to do, then Billy needs to get on board. Yeah, I agree. So, that's the other thing that you do need to give attention to because it's too easy to just...

you know, ignore Billy and you know, and if, and if he doesn't agree three, three times and he's out, right. It's just, but you know, Billy might be changing the plan just by five or 10 % to really in a bit. And that really might be the difference between success and failure. So, yeah, Billy's important. I mean, you could have healthy debate, you know, while you're going through the process, you know, Hey, this, this sucks. That's great. I don't like it. Okay. Well,

Everybody's heard, we've all set our piece, but now somebody's got to make the call. We made a decision. You might not like it, but this is what we're moving forward to. And I think that's important. It's clarity. You know, it's like, Hey, we talked about that. We heard your opinion and, and whatever, but opinions are, you know, need to be trumped by data. you know, when you're in, it's particularly important for the next level down and the next level down and the next level down. If they, if there's a perception that there's not unity in.

strategic direction, then you're not going to get all the employees pointing in this direction. Yeah, it's kind of, so if you think about decision making and, you know, at this level, you know, that's where it all starts and stops, right? It's going to, at some point, you know, the executive leadership team is going to have to make a call. Most leaders today had to deal with unprecedented.

challenges, not only in the marketplace, but as a result of a global pandemic. You know, there's no playbook for why, how do I lead through that? So do you have any insights for the for the listeners out here? Like, look, when you're making and you're inevitably going to have to make a lot of them, make tough decisions. Do you have any good insight for how you go about?

making tough decisions. Is there a process you use or is there just kind of some advice you would give people when they have to make tough calls?

I think you have to think about what you can affect and you have to ignore what you can't affect. So it might be a factor in ultimately a decision, but there's no point banging on about how terrible something is that you have no ability to control. It is what it is. So let's say the US government slap a 60 % duty on something that you're...

important to use. You can complain and bitch about it, but if that's how it's going to be, that's how it's going to be. So you have to take that on board to synthesize your decision making. So first thing, don't worry about things that can't affect because it's truly exhausting. So really focus on the effect. At the end of the day, however bleak it is, you need to do what's right for the overall business.

because the number one responsibility you have as a leader is business success. And ultimately with business success comes great welfare for your employees and so on. Which I'm not saying that's not important, obviously it's important, but if everything is built around business success, all of that other stuff will come along. One of the regrets that I had,

in my career was, was, you know, the company was struggling for results. The market was very weak. We felt it was going to, we felt it was going to turn around. Didn't want to take a headcount reduction plan because we felt that the headcount was going to be needed going forward because it was going to pick up. So we implemented a salary, a compulsory salary reduction program. And,

don't help with cash flows, help with what we needed to get done in the short term. But the recovery didn't happen as quickly as we expected. And that salary reduction stayed in place for a very long time. Certainly, more than personally aware of some of the hardship that was caused by it, particularly with junior stuff. But in hindsight, ultimately what happened was we took a headcount reduction.

ultimately paid the salary, you know, gained the salary back, got everyone back to normal. But the resulting thing was a loss of goodwill by our employee base was absolutely enormous. I had my time again, I would have taken the headcount reduction early on super painful, very difficult to do. But we would have had 6 % of the employees very upset as opposed to everybody being very upset. And that loss of goodwill was

ultimately becomes quite material when you've got a large group of people. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, that's, well, amazingly insightful, right? You probably, anytime you make a decision, you're making the best one you can at the time with the information you have. And, and, and we did it for the right reasons, right? So a little bit of pain for everybody is better than a lot of pain for a small group of people. But also we expected things to bounce.

And I think that was the glass half full, fullness in us that we thought it was going to be temporary. And as it worked out, it was, it did recover, but it just didn't recover to where we expected. So we had to take the action anyway. So, but you're right, like faced with the decision, all the facts at the time, on that day we felt made the good decision. One year later, it was a mistake.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is this is just a kind of great insight. I think people are going to want to hear, you know, because. You know, there's all kinds of market conditions out there. You know, the world right now, a geopolitical situation, the world is, you know, is becoming untenable. Hopefully that'll get itself under control here. But, you know, business gets affected by all of that, you know, supply chains, producer price index.

all this other kind of stuff that ends up affecting business. It's not just a simple decision, right? we'll just take people out. Well, okay, well maybe, but what impact is that gonna have? But just to think through some of the different things that could possibly happen, but then have insight from somebody who's sat in a chair. And so, hey, look, you might be in this spot. And those learnings, I think, are...

super valuable. I think the, you know, the other, you know, the other thing I've learned over the years is, most large corporations have very fat management rankings and, you know, more effective to take senior management out than people do. So first of all, they're more, they're more expensive. Generally, if you've got too many, the, organizationally, it's very political.

So fitting it out reduces that as well. And my experience is you do some of that stuff and the rest of the company is all applauding it. So yeah, I learned that lesson quite early on. So certainly every organization I've been associated with since, very flat management hierarchy. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm a big proponent of as flat as organization as you can make it with wide spans of control.

get as much decision -making power out to the edge of the business, as close, absolutely as close to the customer as possible. And then your people know, you've set the culture, you've set the guidelines, people know what we're trying to do, so let them execute. But I'm with you, it's too many layers, too much bureaucracy. It's no good.

One of the things that in our world is very exciting to talk about, but it's probably a whole episode on its own, but I'd love to get your thoughts on AI. I know that's a huge topic, but as you're starting to look at it for even your own business, your customer's business, just what's your general view on AI and how do you see it impacting business in the near and maybe long term?

Well, it's exciting. It's exciting and frightening at the same time. So, you know, there's a lot of very learned, very successful people that are sort of waving the flag of alarm about it, and what the long term consequences are for mankind without getting super deep about it. So I think there are some consequences. But you know, it's

Time tells us that the winding stuff back just can't be done. So it is what it is. It's here. And from an operating perspective, as these solutions become available, I think it's going to be really exciting. We're already implementing ways that we can service our customers better. Customers can call us, ask questions. They get sent appropriate articles.

So we can dissipate knowledge far better, we can resolve issues better. I think some jobs are quite easy to replace with AI, accounts receivable, jobs like that, I think ultimately will become victim of machine learning and solutions. We're using it across, we're a cloud provider.

and we're using it across our cloud for anomaly detection. We're looking for early warning signs of cyber attacks or any denial of service attacks because of this perpetual monitoring. And if you get alarms, you get multiple false alarms, you can train it to remove the false alarms. So you're just continually improving that ability. And frankly, there's no way we could have manpower.

that's sufficient to do what we can do with machine learning. Yeah, I got a, this is a little embarrassing to admit because I was your vice president of systems engineering at one point, but I was, it was interesting for me to learn. I started taking some courses, you know, on AI, trying to educate myself on it. The term was coined in 1958. I was like, wait, what? Then you start thinking, well, hang on a second. How long have we been in artificial intelligence? But

You know, it was founded up one of the Ivy League schools somewhere up in the Northeast, but that concept has been around for decades. And now the language models that are out, there's a lot of it that's just going to elevate a lot of folks. I think that it's going to free us up to get focused on the work that really matters. Because I've gone, the ability to create content has just become...

I don't want to say simple, but it's certainly way easier. Like I could knock a paper out in a couple of days, you know, get the framework and start tweaking it. But even, but even, even pictures as well. So, you know, any marketer would tell you, you know, if you're creating a website, don't use stock photos, cause it's so obvious that stock photos or use AI created photos, which costs very little money that, and they're, yeah, they're better and that's stock photos. So,

You know, things like that, it's just going to be the normal course of doing business. People aren't going to realize that that's even happening. So I think the thing that's interesting about AI is it's really not just a blanket solution. I think you're going to get AI for content, you're going to get AI for imagery, you're going to get AI for work process flows, you're going to get AI for...

voice interpretation and knowledge bases. So, you know, each of those is going to grow, you know, an AI, you know, perspective will grow for each of those pillars. So it'll be, it'll be, it'll, it'll result in being universal, but I don't think the progress is going to be blankly universal. I think that you're going to see these certain key areas where it's adopted very quickly because the gain is just... I agree. Well, as long as the system doesn't become aware,

you know, and start taking us all out, I think. Well, and you know, let's let's be fair. I mean, some of the image manipulation that can be done that's appearing on social media. Yeah, it's not good. It's not good. There's a lot of bad actors out there. And we got to be mindful of that. Like I was like, you just think about like new technology, it comes in naturally. Most people want to see the good side of it. But man, if you're not paying attention,

You know, just think about the, just the security aspect of networks, how they've just become, you know, that is priority. Probably the number one thing most people worry about is security, you know, because everything else is so vulnerable underneath it. But when you start reading about, you know, things like quantum computing and what have you, and it's like, well, all this encryption and stuff we have today, well, it'll be rendered useless.

you know, with quantum computing. So on one hand, you're like, okay, well, that's a little scary. But then on the other hand, you think, huh, what kind of encryption would quantum computing be able to put on top of stuff that, you know, will change our world? So I think the next 10 years is going to be fascinating.

Well, certainly from an IT perspective, you know, it's always been our choice, right? So, right. Your example with quantum computing is great. So everyone focused on quantum computing, cracking encryption. Yeah. Let's start a company creating uncrackable encryption using quantum computer. That would be huge. Huge. So speaking of starting companies, you know, you've, you've started a couple, you've worked with a few, you know,

Can you give us a little insight on what inspired you to do that? To pick the company or the type of company to start, what got you up in the morning to do it? And what are one or two really memorable things you'd like to share with the readers that you took away from building those businesses over the years?

Well, it's, yeah, there's a few things I remember most. And what I remember most is, you know, you're going from having 2000 employees to there's two of us. And, you know, we're going to go, you know, I'm going to go and see a customer, okay, who's preparing that proposal and the presentation? Are you looking behind? And, okay. So my

My Excel PowerPoint skills absolutely rocketed as a result of starting my own business. That's the first thing I can say. I started my career in semiconductors and then moved into telephony. The downside of telephony is it's a declining market. Running a business in a declining market is tough, right? Because

The only way you can get that business to grow is to take market share off other people and material share off other people as the market is declining. So when I started a hosted biz, I felt that cloud was going to be a high growth market. No genius statement there. But I think what we felt was possible was...

but you've got all these IT resellers, MSPs, VARs, ultimate clouds can affect them all. And they won't have the wherewithal to create their own cloud solutions. So they won't have the fiscal ability, the technical ability, the time or bandwidth to do it. So we started a cloud company that was really targeted at MSPs and IT resellers. So we could go to you, Steve. So let's say you have Steve Brown Networks.

that you can have a whole suite of cloud services all branded as Steve Brown Networks. And that was the commercial model that we took to market. And I think the timing was good and the cloud market very strong and accelerated through the pandemic as well. So yeah, it worked out well for us. But that was the premise of why we did it. And to be honest, when we first started,

without getting too technical, we felt the future was going to be virtual desktop. So all of our investment was around virtual desktop. So this ability to run, you know, windows machines on iPads, Macs, something else's, you know, tablet, we felt was very compelling and it is very compelling. It's fully managed, it's secure, but it's expensive. And we couldn't get sufficient customers over the line.

to accept it. So we kind of pivoted to this more broad cloud solution. The first thing I remember is, is like I said, being two people sat in an office doing everything, taking it in turns to make the tea. And then the second thing I remember is getting some customers, we determined very early on that cloud backup and disaster recovery was very, very compelling in the cloud. And, you know,

I talked to some customers about it and they said, this is great. Yeah. Where do I sign? Yeah. Really want to implement this. and how long have you been in business? Four weeks. The worst possible answer for a company that's offering cloud backup. So that took some finesse in to get over. But yeah, they're all great learning things and they were...

You know, they, when I say them now, they sound ridiculous, but it was exciting. And, you know, I remember, you know, because of that credibility issue we had to overcome, we decided that we needed to win a banner customer. So what we could say is instead of saying we've been in business for four weeks, we could say, well, this company is a customer of ours. So we picked a local brewery.

So there was a brewery that was growing very fast in the city. I live in Ottawa, so there was a microbrewery that was doing very, very well. And this was before microbreweries was trendy. This is 10, 12 years ago. So we went totally on the offensive to win this customer. And we were sending donuts to their offices. We were sending little boxes of chocolates to the IT people and the CEO.

We turn up at their festivals and brew offs and make sure that it all saw that we were there and ultimately we won that customer. And I don't think I've spent much money winning any other customer since. But it was kind of important to have that first customer as you know, on the path. But you know, a lot of fun doing all that stuff was a lot of fun. And the other difference is 2000 people.

You know, when the company started growing and we've got 15 people or 20, you can still do whatever you like because you're so fleet afoot and so flexible on what you could do. We'd be pricing things. We had no idea how to deliver them. But, you know, we just saw demand and we would, and then, you know, we find a way to get it done, which you can do when you, when you're, you know, everyone's pointing the same direction.

have a huddle in the office. This is really important. We need to get this done. How are we going to do it? Yeah. And I think it's, you know, the IT market is getting more and more fragmented, you know, with, you know, whether people want to go hyper -convert servers or whether they want to go cloud, whether they want to have a hyperscaler, whether they want to, a more of a boutique offering. The choice is endless. And that choice is getting bigger and bigger. And, you know, what,

what we find is that we win when we don't tell the customer they're wrong doing what they're doing today. Lots and lots of IT companies tell the customer that what they're doing is stupid. And frankly, if you tell the customer what they're doing is stupid, you're telling the customer they're stupid, which I've never seen as a great sales strategy. And I think it...

I think people look at it and say, well, what you're doing is wrong, so you're going to rip it all out. So therefore the sale is bigger. I tell you what, you're not getting that deal over the line. So you've got to find a way to improve what they've got. And if what they've done is not what you were done, we need to understand why they did it that way. Because something would have forced them to do that, that is important to them, might be perceived, might not be real, but I had a sales leader that had a picture of Napoleon above his desk.

He didn't last very long. Taking the Machiavellian approach, are you? Okay. Well, see how that works out. Awesome. Well, I have one more question for you, Paul. I really, really, really appreciate your time. So, you know, it's no big secret. You know, sales has changed over the years, you know, with the internet, democratized information, a lot of social networking, lots of information out there.

You know, so what advice would you have for people in my profession that are in sales and they're going to meet with a CEO or C level? What advice do you have for the modern salesperson when they do get to the C level finally?

at times of change for sure. So I think if you're trying to get to the C level, you can't under stress how much homework you have to have to do before you try. I've got spam filters, but I'm still getting 50, 60 emails a day from people that just get leads for you.

We outsource your IT to us, buy our cloud services, and they're just spam. And there was zero chance of that being successful. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, if you do the homework, you'll realize, I might be the CEO of Optinine, but I'm really not making a decision about what storage we're going to buy. So if you want to sell Optinine store,

you know, stories to optimize. Don't, don't spam me because that's, there's just no way that's going to help unless you upset me so much that when a purchase order does come across my desk, I say, I don't want to do business with these guys. Unlikely, but, but, but you know, you've got, you've got to get your pitch to the people making the decision. And then, and then the way to reach those people, is you have to have massively tailored communication method, right? So.

You know, I saw that you're in this space and you recently won this customer and this customer. You've just hired somebody who's a previous customer of ours at another company. You do all of that work. First of all, I guarantee that email is now read. So that's step one. And then obviously, there's got to be something compelling. You're going to save the money, you're going to increase their efficiency, you're going to allow them to offer more services, whatever it is, it has to be tailored that way.

That's all the questions I have for you today. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit with us and hopefully we'll do this again in the future.

Thank you.