Graham Charlton, CFO at Softcat (PART 3)

I don't think there's one answer to that. It's, and that's again the beauty of our business. We've got such a broad offering now. We've got such a broad 10,000 customers in the UK selling all types of infrastructure to them. So we don't have to try and guess or know where that opportunity is because our account managers and sales people are finding it out on a day-to-day basis with all of their customers. And again, our job is to just respond to that. So yeah, we don't have to sort of place bets or try and work it out in advance. I mean, the hot topics will always be this: cloud computing and how we help people move workloads to the public cloud, or how we secure that. End user compute environments are shifting because of hybrid working. So there's a load of hot topics, and we have to have capabilities across those, but different customers are doing different things at different times, and so you've got to be pretty agile with it as well.

Yeah, it's an important one to get the right tone here. Because within Softcat we're very confident about the future of our industry and the future of the company, and that's great, and it's good that our people know that. But as you say, there's an awful lot of upheaval in the world. It's difficult for a lot of companies out there. Society has gone through a heck of a shift with the pandemic, and now we've got an inflationary environment that nobody's seen for 15 years or whatever it is, and we've got interest rates. So for a lot of businesses, tough times. So trying to get our people to understand that for Softcat and our industry we think this is a great opportunity to keep hiring, to keep expanding, keep listening to customers and move the proposition in the direction that they need us to go. But a lot of our sales people's customers have been feeling it very differently. They won't have that confidence. They'll be in a different reality. So trying to balance that confidence that we have with empathy for customers in a different situation is something I spend a lot of time on. We have a management meeting once a month where we get 200 people in Softcat, about 10% of the organization, on a call and we just talk about how we're seeing things and trying to communicate that and to build their empathy for customers in different situations. Something we spend quite a lot of time on. But yeah, it's difficult and it is tough times for people, but not I think for our industry or for Softcat. We're planning this year we'll keep building the team by probably 15 or more in terms of expansion of our own business. So we're pretty confident, and it's a great time to hire people as well.

Um, so both. I mean, it's yeah, we've always said that when everybody else is batting down the hatches and not recruiting or laying people off, it's a brilliant time to go out and get some fantastic talent into the business. So we're definitely doing that. I mean, this year to grow our head count by 15 to 20 percent, which is what we're looking to do, we'll hire about 700 people. So we've got maybe 250 people coming in as graduates or maybe second jobbers, but about 90 of those are graduates and apprentices coming into the sales team, and we'll continue with that for sure. That's a — and you know again, even at that level the recruitment environment's easier because people like Microsoft or whoever maybe not hiring, so there's an availability of talent that we'll definitely take advantage of at the graduate level, but at the more serious level, senior level as well. So we always need technologists, we need people who've got different experiences. So yeah, across all angles we see it as a good opportunity to find the right people.

So our policy is that people can make their own decisions and choose when and where they work, but we'd like them to have a bias towards the office because we know that people working together, physically being together, is really important for building community, building a culture, and especially for the young kids coming into the business from learning from other people who've been there and done it as well. So we want people to be in the office working together, but we want them to have freedom of choice to do what's right for them and for the company and make decisions around that. That's everything for me about Softcat that makes it great is that we do what's right for the collective good, and you can't force people into that. You have to appeal to them to think about it in that way, role model the right behaviors, and then hopefully you find the right balance because there is a best of both worlds here. People being in the office five days a week caused a lot of problems for people whether it's child care or whatever it is. So having flexibility is great, but we need them to do what's right for them and the company in balance and make good judgments. So that's what we're trying to get to, and then you end up with a different answer for everybody and that's okay. So we are in a situation where yeah, I reckon we've probably got 20% of the people in, maybe 25% on a Monday and Friday, probably between 70 and 90% during the week depending on what's going on in each office, and that is working really, really well for us. I think the pendulum's still moving and it hasn't fully established yet, but that's our approach and that's how it's playing out, and it feels pretty healthy to us.

Um, I don't know. Probably something along the lines of, because business and human systems are so complicated, and I'm quite a — I kind of see the world in black and white and think I know, I like to know how things work and what the answer is. But if you try and do that on your own, you try and come up with the answer to something on your own, you are most often wrong. And I've kind of learned that probably in the hard way during my career that thinking I know the answer and right, here's what we're going to do and let's get on with it, and then find out, 'Um, yeah, I should have talked to them' or 'That was a perspective I was missing, that if only I had had, we would have done it differently.' So you've got to be clear and decisive, but you have to wait until you're fully informed to try and get there, and talking to people with different views and different ways of seeing things. I always find it interesting, we do internally, we do this for senior leaders, we do this sort of Finance for Senior Leaders course which I kind of run myself and some other people do. And often people who aren't from a finance background come to that thinking they'll always be a spreadsheet that you can create that'll tell you the answer, and they find it really surprising that I say to them as the finance person, you'll never get the answer from a spreadsheet. It's kind of one input, and the point is that the world's too complicated to put into a spreadsheet. And it's helpful to put numbers around stuff, but it's the thoughts that are in people's heads and bringing that together that will find you the right way forward. So taking the time to think about things, talk to people, gather different perspectives, be open-minded, and be absolutely honest with yourself about when you've got stuff wrong. Those are probably the hardest lessons I've learned and what I think about pretty much every day.

Thanks for having me.