Many entrepreneurs discover their vocation early, but for some it can happen much later. I talk to J.J. Kett, CEO of Irish-headquartered technology company VoiceSage about his journey from researcher and lecturer in animal nutrition to farm manager and university fundraiser to becoming an entrepreneur in the second half of his life. What did he learn from this unusual pathway, and what message does he have for others who feel that they haven't found the right career yet?
Alastair Dryburgh: JJ, before we get into the history, tell me a little about your current business.
JJ Kett: VoiceSage is a modern enterprise-to-customer communications company. We develop the software that enables brands to communicate proactively out to their customer base via an interactive platform with a suite of products on it that enables companies to deliver great customer experience, and therefore get their customers to do more business with them and ideally, get them to stay with them forever. We help to enable the business to dramatically cut their costs by comparison with their older, less effective and inefficient call centre type operation. I sometimes use the analogy of the great mediaeval castle: the bigger the lord, the bigger the castle, and the bigger the castle, the bigger the moat.
Dryburgh: The harder it is to get in.
Kett: Precisely. The purpose of the moat is to keep those pesky farmers, country folk and peasants out. And as global companies got bigger and bigger, the moat, the centre, got bigger. Until we and some of our competitors arrived about 12, 15 years ago, if the customer wanted the company to do something, they had to phone in or write in, and often wait for extended periods to be connected to a customer service person.
The hardest thing, I've always found, about not being an entrepreneur until the second half of my life, is can you come up with a really good idea that's disruptive in a really big market. One quick look at this, and I was saying, this industry hasn't changed in 80 or 90 years – it’s just got bigger and bigger call centres, with high costs and poor service. But hang on a sec; these companies now have all the information on-site in a database. They know more about the customer than your average customer remembers about his or her dealings with that company. That means they could be proactive about contacting customers if they had a communication engine that talks directly to the customer database. The database would then say, look, we need to contact John or Jane or Alistair to say there's not enough money in their account to meet his direct debits at the end of the month, which is costly for both sides. Or so-and-so owes us some money, we've sent him an invoice, it's time to give him a reminder.
In fairness, I didn't originate the idea. I spotted it in America, but it was being done very poorly. So I set out to build a company that would do that really well.
Dryburgh: So that's where you are now, but you mentioned that you didn't become an entrepreneur until the second half of your life. How did you get there?
Kett: I was a researcher and lecturer on animal nutrition, human nutrition and farm management, with a bit of biochemistry, at University College Cork in Ireland. As part of that role I had taken on the loss-making part of the University, which was basically a farm sitting on a 760-acre estate. My team and I turned it from being hugely loss-making to being profitable inside five years.
Unlike the other 80-plus departments in the university, everybody else saw their department as having a budget to spend, but I saw myself as having to generate a profit so that I'd have money for my research next year. Because of the fact that we were the only team in the university that was actually generating a profit, the University thought, ah, he knows about money so we we’ll put him in charge of fundraising.
The group of business people that the University had recruited leant on me to say look, at least come in and act as a translator, initially, as I knew the difference between a profit and a loss. I said, so does the President. No, he doesn't, they said – he only knows the difference between living within budget and not living within budget.
Dryburgh: So lecturer and farm manager to fundraiser. We're still not at entrepreneur. What was the next step?
Kett: I suppose what got me thinking about the entrepreneurial route in the end was totally driven by philanthropy, because one of our biggest donors had put a challenge to me, saying, J.J., there'll be a big check in it if you can figure out what USP to give to the University.
The answer came at a big American event, a dinner for really top profile Irish and English business people of Irish and English descent who were at the top of politics and business in New York. We went down to the New York Sailing Club, the really posh one, old style from the 1800s, and at five to eleven, the butler arrived clanking this big bell and said, Alright ladies, the gentlemen would like to have their time to themselves, so please retire to the drawing room.
There were three things that really struck me from the subsequent conversation. One, watching the Irish guys in particular, was the Irish Famine aspect, then, the Irish Diaspora story and then their pride in how entrepreneurial the families had been over several generations – coming up from poor ancestors most of them, then moving a step up in society each generation.
In response I started an entrepreneurship programme to appeal to donors. We tried to get it through the commerce faculty twice, and they nearly killed it. It was amazing that our then commerce faculty did not understand the value of these potential partners to our cause – but within months, we had an International Entrepreneurship Board with a Chairman from California and over 3,500 student members; the largest student society on campus.
Starting that program partly prepared me for moving, but I think there was even a bigger driver behind it. Sitting across the table from these wealthy guys, the CEOs and chairmen of big US companies, particularly the self-made guys who had started and built huge companies, I think something got in my head – that someday I wanted to be sitting at that side of the table. It's as simple as that.
Dryburgh: So how did it happen?
Kett: I was looking around for a new idea. I had a year to go in a commitment I had made to two young Irish guys who had come back from Southeast Asia with the idea of doing a start-up; I was working in the University Foundation at the time and was helping people through our entrepreneurship board. One day when I was fairly seriously thinking of moving on to something else, a young guy from up near Dublin walked into the office looking for a bit of help and some introductions.
Well, this guy and his colleague had the idea of developing SAP for researchers. So, SAP was set up for accountants, but they were developing SAP for researchers via a new start-up company called Kinematik. Because I had spent years in research, I said, okay, I understand this, I understand what they're doing, so I joined Kinematik. The arrangement was, I'll work with you for three years and I'll probably move on to something else – for me, it was an opportunity to learn, for them an opportunity to work with somebody who had raised money in the past and had business contacts.
So, over that three years, we raised $4.5 million, got them close to profitability, built a product from scratch, and it was a good learning experience. I kind of was hired as COO and then became CFO, and then I became a half dozen other things – we were all learning on the fly There were some interesting days where you walked in and scratched your head and said can we hire another adult please? We got to 22 staff, but the oldest were still the two founders, who were not yet 30.
That lack of maturity could be a problem. I remember our guy said you can't ask our developers anything for the next couple of weeks, we're on a special project. So, after about 6 weeks, he said come on, we'll have some cakes here and do an hour's demonstration. I sat there for the first ten minutes, and I said, alright, lads, what else is there to this? I see these colourful screens, great, but you're not in Hollywood and you're not working for Walt Disney – what else did you do? How does this relate to our value proposition?
"Oh, it doesn't relate to the product, one of us had a great idea six weeks ago, we discussed in the pub, we decided we'd definitely build it, we thought it would take two months, but we got it built in six weeks and we're really proud of ourselves."
"But what relevance does it have to the company?"
"Oh, it doesn't have any relevance to the company, but it shows we can build stuff like this."
I just said, all right, lads, I'm leaving and will be back on Monday morning, but when I'm doing the wages next month, there'll be six weeks wages deducted. There wasn't in the end, but I let the threat sit there for two more weeks, just to try to bring them to their senses.
For guys who were so real and so focused, they could go off on a tangent. It can be strange.
Dryburgh: This is a remarkable journey. You've gone from lecturer in animal nutrition, to university fundraiser, to entrepreneur acting as adult supervision in a business, then to founder of another business. It's a very unusual path.
What would you say to people about business based on your other experience? What do you think you've learned from doing all of these different things? And starting in a completely different place what do you see that may be missing in businesses with people who have followed a more mainstream path?
Kett: The main thing I usually say to people is – and I did always drill it into my own three kids – is just because you did accountancy, you don't have to stay with accountancy. Just because you did engineering, doesn't mean you have to stay with that. Some people say, I'm qualified as this or I'm not qualified. So don’t be tied down to roles unnecessarily if they stop making sense for you or your new idea.
The next thing is all this mystique around financing. In young fast-growing start up businesses, your cash flow is the thing that you have to manage. I have accountant friends who are always saying to me, cash flow is complicated, and I say, no, it's very simple in start-up companies. If you keep one bank account and you run everything through that bank account, then what's left in the bank account at the end of the month is your cash flow.
And they say, no it's more complicated, you have to allow for x and y. And I'd say in accountancy you do, but in real life, you don't. If you have the cash, you can pay the bills; if you don't, you can't
Dryburgh: If you were looking for people to join a start up, what sort of things would you be looking for if you're not necessarily going to put all the weight on professional qualifications?
Kett: I think my answer would have been different five and different again 10 years ago. The biggest concern I'd have interviewing anyone for a senior role is whether they can live with what I call ‘scale and risk’. It's important that you explain there will be risk and see how they respond to that. I've become a firm believer over time that sometimes problems come up because that individual is fine, but that the company is wrong for them, rather than the other way around. If you can pick that up early, it saves pain and grief later on.
Dryburgh: So, willingness to accept risk. Other things that you'd be particularly looking for?
Kett: I'm a big believer in people. People are what make the world go around. I also believe that most people are actually really good – most are honest and trustworthy. It’s the capability side you need to watch for: are they up to the job? Because if not, it can cause funny behavior. Or if they're uncomfortable with something, they can start acting in different ways – they start hiding the fact that they haven't done something crucial, which is going to crop up sooner or later.
You're also definitely looking for people who will buy into the company story. You want people who are hungry because I want to know if we can build up a passion there – we all spend too much time at work not to be really interested in it. If that passion is missing, a customer will call late on a Friday because your service has gone down or they're having a problem. Maybe it's a problem that's on their side, but will that person actually stick around for the next hour or two or three to solve it? You never want someone working for you who won’t stick around and sort it for them because if they will you've got a customer there that's going to be so committed to you. That’s the sort of person I want on my team.
