T…WINNING Brendon Cross is the public face of STL, the energy behind the scenes and the driving force as the business builds on the twenty-five year-old foundations of its voice-based history and moves into IT based solutions. He’s also the founder of the phenomenal Twin Town charity event which this year will see cumulative funds raised for the wonderful SpecialEffect surge past £1 million. As STL enters a new and exciting period of growth, it’s also the perfect time for Brendon to introduce a new face to help the company really fly. Interview by Richard Rosser.
But rewind twenty-five years, I begin by asking Brendon how it all started.
business and is impatient and aspirational like I was, but I’ve told him to grow slowly.
“The business started in my bedroom when I lived in East Oxford, arguably at the wrong time when I had a new born son. The economic climate was challenging but I think in some ways it was a good time to start a business because you certainly had people’s attention. It was very difficult to borrow money from the bank so you started with everything you could scrape together and a credit card, the usual kind of things and you learn some lessons along the way.
“I’ve also learned that it’s all about people and not just delivering good service. I had a customer conversation with a long-standing customer recently who said, ‘the great thing about you is it always works. It just works. We never need to talk to you and I never need to call you’. I found myself thinking that was great, but not ideal…..we never get to prove ourselves, we rarely need to get our customers out of a hole, we sometimes don’t have that opportunity to cement a relationship or have any interaction. I suppose that’s where Twin Town now plays a key role in the business…it gives us face time with a huge number of our customers in a concentrated period of time which has a long term effect.” Some might say a special effect!
“The two biggest lessons I have learned in business are that the banks are fair weather friends who only want to give you an umbrella when it’s not raining …. you don’t see them for dust when it is. “The other, without being corny, is that profit is sanity and turnover is vanity. In the first seven years of STL we doubled the size of the business every year, but we made the same money every year. It could have been worse, we could have lost money, but we realised we were being busy fools…. why not go for 25% growth year on year and make more profit? And that’s what we have managed to and I’m now passing on those lessons to my twenty-five year old son, Jordan, who has just started his own
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So did Brendon foresee a twenty-five years packed with growth back in 1995? “The vision on day one was to create a service company in what was the old communications world. We sold phone systems, we would cable a building, we did lines, we did calls, we probably did mobiles and way back then we’d stick it all on one bill which was pretty radical, because no one else was, and away we went.
“I sold the original business back in 2004 when I wasn’t looking to do so, but TalkTalk came along and offered us a decent price for the business which was great as I got to check a few boxes in my personal life. I’d started a business on wing and a prayer and all of a sudden, I had the funds and the cash to build the business properly. Since 2004, that’s what we have done with the right ticks in the right boxes in terms of ISO 9001 ISO13001 and, shortly to be announced, ISO27001 for Information Security.” In twenty-five years there have been plenty of highs and lows, but Brendon clearly draws immense pride from competing with bigger organisations with significantly deeper pockets. “We’ve always managed to compete with organisations that were supposedly bigger and stronger than we were and we’re still very fortunate to hold our own in a very competitive industry. We never count our chickens, but we’re very, very fortunate to count a number of F1 teams as our customers, so we’re delivering technology to a bleeding edge sector which allows us to be really good at delivering technology to leading edge sectors. “We were fortunate enough to deliver communications for the London 2012 Olympic Games, something that we weren’t able to shout about much at the time because BT were the main
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