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SouthTechMission critical foreconomic prosperity
Interview with ANDREW YATESCHIEF EXECUTIVEARTESIAN SOLUTIONS
Report commissioned by
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The south of England is home to worldclass technology companies, and their success is vital if the country is to continue to develop and sustain a knowledge-based economy.
But what are the specific operational and strategic issues which have an impact on their ability to grow and achieve their potential? How is it possible to build long-term value in a such a constantly dynamic market?
Companies with market leadership credentials as well as those with the ability to achieve that position provide a barometer reading in a report co-commissioned by MHA MacIntyre Hudson.
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Ask Andrew Yates what his business does, and instead of an elevator pitch he’ll tell you how his thirteen-year-old daughter described it. “Maddy said it’s about ‘software that makes salespeople look awesome’,” says the chief executive of Artesian Solutions.
“Of course most salespeople think they’re awesome anyway, but we make them even more ‘awesomer’,” he smiles.
Somewhat less concisely expressed, Artesian are regarded as the world’s most powerful sales intelligence app. It enables companies to better communicate their B2B sales message by targeting, connecting and sharing relevant, timely and contextual information with customers and prospects. They can more quickly and efficiently build prospect lists and find information about the companies they want to target, their financial records and of course their people – their sentiments, opinions, and motivations - all in one consolidated view.
“Imagine if you’d come here today already knowing that much about me and our company,” Yates says. “Knowing our financial background, shareholding, our investors, what debt we have and our key financial ratios. You could even see a profile of every director and know everything that’s happened in the news and social media which is relevant to us.
With a nicely manicured Twitter feed that cuts out what you don’t need to know.”
Using a computer science term relating to the application of ‘rules’ based on previous experience in order to solve a problem, rather than using a mathematical procedure, he explains: “We produce a ranking based on a heuristic formula to prioritise the stuff you need to know about, which would leave a lasting impression if it was acted upon. Say you wanted to approach a prospect. Instead of just writing ‘hello, I think our product might reduce your costs per employee, can I come and see you?’ your approach could be to congratulate them on winning an industry award or doing the Three Peaks challenge, and then introduce a business agenda, or a solution to a problem they have been grappling with.”
Yates co-founded the business in 2006 with two computer industry colleagues - Mike Blackadder is chief customer officer and Steve Borthwick chief technology officer. He explains how the three were in at the birth of business intelligence software. “We were using computer logic to interrogate and make sense of structured databases to help people make better decisions. With Artesian we had this crazy notion that we could do it to unstructured data too, for example webpages, text in news articles, social
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these sources, consolidate it, ‘smash’ it all together using computer science, and then deliver it via simple apps which are easy to use.”
And LinkedIn? “Everybody knows about LinkedIn but perhaps not how to optimise its use most effectively,” replies Yates. “And LinkedIn is weak around the company stuff and insight, aside from what people decide to publish - and less than one per cent of members contribute regularly. Because of this, adoption rates of LinkedIn tools like Sales Navigator are only about 20%, because people only use it when they need to. But we create a scenario where Artesian comes to you; we push through the information we think you need.”
The Artesian app is relevant for both very organised people who already research their prospects and contacts; and for what Yates calls the middle majority - the 80% of us who don’t.
“Out of a hundred people in an organisation, maybe twenty do the right research before a meeting, but because the others are maybe time poor,” he suggests, “they might decide to wing it or look at LinkedIn in the lift just before the meeting. But this smart technology puts all the information for them on a plate. And the person who has the discipline to do the research gets their forty-five
media, or whatever Donald Trump is tweeting. In these domains there are no rules, no consistency in grammar or sentence construction, no rows and columns, just text.
“You couldn’t use traditional data query technology to make sense of that data and make it useful, so we had to invent something that would. Commercial people don’t care about the technology behind it; they just want to know about something as soon as it happens and prefer not to have to read about things that are not important. We prioritise the high potential insights to save time by helping users make connections between the insight and the people they need to contact, helping them keep on top of every breaking piece of news that affects them.”
Artesian pull their insights from “literally millions of raw data sources” including Companies House, Experian, Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, plus social media like Twitter and Google blogs.
“Businesses tend to forget obvious consumer-oriented media like YouTube and Facebook as sources of information,” says Yates. “And they might not have heard of resources like Crunchbase and some lesser known gems for corporate insight. We take information from all
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Yates himself once planned to become a professional rugby player – it was a rugby contact who got him his first job in software – and he says successful sports people and business people have characteristics in common. “Being accountable to yourself and the team, being self-motivated, having drive, focus and teamwork skills, putting in an incredible amount of work behind the scenes so that you deliver a polished performance; taking a shot is all about the lead-up.”
And experience of being able to turn around adverse situations, he adds. “Failure is okay; if you mess up, that’s okay as well. But you have to learn from it; the definition of insanity is doing the same thing as yesterday and expecting a different result. When you fail you should fail fast and then start again.”
One of the challenges he’s faced is learning how to delegate as the business has grown. “In the early days the founders can be very, very precise in terms of how they control what is happening, but that’s not a scalable approach,” explains Yates. “You have to find high-quality people and empower them to step up to leadership. But delegation is hard for entrepreneurs; most are Type A personalities who like to know where absolutely everything is. It’s a maturity thing; you learn that it’s
minutes back by not having to research multiple sources any more. We tell you lots of cool stuff to make you look and feel awesome.” Yates says Artesian can also drive adoption by spotting where people are not using the system to its full advantage. “The algorithm can see you’re not doing something, so then for example it will give you advice on how to write killer emails or let you select a template to send a congratulatory note, all from inside the system.”
The next stage will be to add what Yates calls “new doom and gloom features,” to help users in regulated industries or compliance and risk functions, to have at their fingertips for example a company’s credit history, look for county court judgments, adverse media coverage, trade sanctions. “It means they can easily pre-screen a prospective customer,” he says. Called aRCHi, this will make Artesian even more valuable to their customers, who include UK banks, insurance companies and professional services firms. One financial institution, he reveals, has it mandated in their processes that staff must spend ten minutes on Artesian before a meeting.
Customers pay a monthly fee per user, which includes training and support. There are 30,000 users with a customer retention rate of some 90%.
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and funky place but Artesian doesn’t have the sort of cappuccino culture of a technology multinational, which is so big that people don’t have a sense of purpose and bonuses are not related to anything; they either happen or they don’t and employees don’t really believe they can influence the process. But here, if someone meets key performance indicators, they will get rewarded.”
Revenue this year will exceed £5million and current growth rates should take Artesian Solutions to £10million. That will be from the fruits of R&D investment and with the help of targeted international growth. Artesian already have an office in Boston, but generally the international work will be undertaken from the UK. “The challenge will be finding multilingual staff to do translation and sales,” says Yates.
The founders and employees own about half of the company. There is some leveraged debt to help with cash flow and capital from Octopus Capital, who have brought “great perspective”, he says. “We don’t necessarily have to take their advice but it’s extremely valuable to have it. Mentoring is always useful, even for people who are mentors themselves.” He’s referring to having helped other early-stage companies by sitting on their boards, something he would like to do more of.
okay if absolutely everything doesn’t go to plan.”
What makes a technology business successful is thinking about the core capabilities and skills as a three-legged stool of strong technology, strong sales and making customers successful, he observes. “Companies can’t scale and grow if one of those three legs is missing. For example, a chief executive from a technology background might not understand sales, or fully appreciate that you have to make something which is practical for people to use and that they will want to pay money for.”
Shared corporate values among the founders are also really important, he goes on. “Business is like a marriage; you don’t always see eye-to-eye about everything, but if you have the same values you work your way through it.”
Interestingly, Yates is relaxed about skill shortages in the technology sector. That’s because he believes the traditional corporate culture holds little appeal to the new generation, which is to the advantage of companies of the size of Artesian Solutions.
“Millennials like somewhere where they can have autonomy and influence and where they can help define the culture themselves,” he suggests. “We’re a fresh
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Yates won the 10,000euros prize as a result. “I went from spotty Clark Kent to Superman overnight,” he laughs. “Everyone wanted to be our friend. I went from being ‘uninvestable’ to having lots of options. I literally had twenty-seven business cards pressed into my hand by venture capitalists and the irony was that some of them had previously rejected us!”
One thing he has observed though from his experience of raising finance is that a technology entrepreneur can have “deluded” ideas of their company’s value. “They want to raise money to meet their salary expectations,” he points out. “In the real world, nobody is going to invest to pay for that; how about you work for free and use the money to pay for five other people’s salaries?”
Longer term, Yates says Artesian Solutions have options. “We could be merged or consolidated using private equity; we could float, although that’s less likely, or we could be acquired. We could power on through and scale from £10million to £100million, but whatever happens in the future we aim to continue building a great British technology company.”
Interview written and published for MHA MacIntyre Hudsonby DECISION magazinewww.decisionmagazine.co.uk
And he does have some real experience to share. He reflects on early experiences of pitching for investment. “I used to think I was pretty awesome but no one wanted to invest and the feedback was that the problem was me,” he recalls. “I was regarded as not ‘investable’; I had risk written all over me, but I didn’t know it. I was too effervescent and I said the wrong things. I was way too over-enthusiastic. I was getting no, no. no from venture capital investors and kept telling myself that rejection was good for my soul. I can tell you it’s not, and I didn’t like it!” he smiles.
Then he was invited to pitch as part of a Microsoft business accelerator scheme run by Bindi Karia, now a technology investor and described as the ‘queen of start-ups’. “The programme meant Microsoft gave you all the tech you needed to build a company, but it culminated in them choosing the eighteen best in Europe from 37,000 to showcase what they had produced and pitch to a panel of high-profile people. Part of the deal was coaching on how to pitch. My coach said my pitch was terrible; he took it apart and changed everything. That afternoon I did it exactly the way I had been coached: I gave the same information but in a different order and with a different emphasis, and cut out about 80% of the presentation.”
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