Sea Captains are never happy I read this week.
It is interesting because a sea captain can never rest in calm waters because they are worried about the next storm. When the waters change, they are anxious and when the storm is at its height, they are so consumed in navigating safely through to calmer waters that happiness is the last thought on their minds. Then the cycle starts again. This constant state of anxiety is the opposite of some of my previous writings where I describe every day as being a good day and that should be our mantra but there again is it really the opposite?
The calm water, storm, calm water is similar to my recent observations on stories and the fact that our ability to tell stories sets us apart and every story follows the same pattern. They start in a good place, always encounter problems and there is a happy ending. I found myself practising what I preach this week as a couple of things presented challenges, a couple of deals didn’t work out and so the choppy waters needed navigating though. Trusting my new learning about the story curve, I knew the story would end in a good place and that is the whole point. I knew it and I just had to navigate it through.
I also bet that the wizened old sea captain wouldn’t change a thing and despite never being happy is probably the most contented person in the world. Some interesting sea captain anecdotes to finish my new fascination with the sea:
“A good captain is not made from calm seas”
“A captain who does not know where he wants to sail never reaches his destination”
I could write all day on both, but you can use your imagination and draw some parallels perhaps?
I can’t resist one comment – embrace the storm because if you understand that it will come and go, you will learn so much and your experience will become another story and so on…
What have love affairs got to do with this newsletter?
Jane just reminded me that my 10-year anniversary with Concurrent Engineering is approaching. I remember where it started, and it was certainly no love affair and I didn’t really go looking for it. I was sold to and it was a good idea at the time. I didn’t have a plan as such, and I didn’t have any notion that I would be writing this 10 years later. How times change but the biggest reflection for me is how I have changed. I think it is like an arranged marriage! You can’t be in love on day one in that situation but with a bit of luck you might grow to like each other and perhaps end up in love! Those of you who remember Manish may have heard him tell this story? When he met Poonam for the first time, both agreed that they couldn’t be bothered with any more ‘arranged’ meetings so they might as well get married! And so, the love affair started!
So, this is where I am with Concurrent Engineering.
The company has been good to me and with the exception of being 21 years old and taking delivery of my first Scania 142 truck, this is the best love affair of my professional life. I am grateful and I am excited for the future. The next year is always going to be the best year yet and that is the way to live. My wife asked me last night what I would change during my time with the company and it is a good question. I could go into specific deals that I lost carelessly or with more planning I could have won, I could look at sales reps that didn’t work out and reflect on what I could have done better and the list goes on but the real answer is that I would not change a single day of my journey. Remember that it is all a story to be told one day and within that story there are many storms, but the happy ending is guaranteed.
My advice on 10 years and it is my advice and nothing more...
On to the day job
Losing Bladon Jets last quarter was tough and despite the strongest minds and declarations that we move on and it is business as usual, it is not quite that straight forward. The post-match interviews are always tough for the losing coach and there were a few of those to do but we are good now and I feel a lesson has been learned. Being outsold is part of the process and the more it happens, the more you learn and the less it happens.
We have some exciting deals this quarter with over £400k of GP in our top 5 deals including the Logitech renewal that Owen and Laura manage. Ipeco and Aggreko are two important opportunities that I am working on and Luke has a great opportunity to expand the Mathcad footprint at Subsea 7. Lee’s highest GP deal this quarter is Enersys and working on a product configurator which is slightly tougher to quantify but that makes our top 5. Good opportunities.
Matthew and Gavin are approaching the end of their first months and the best accolade for each of them is the fact that it feels much longer. They are part of the team and creating value opportunities for themselves already. Their onboarding has been different to some of the previous journeys in that I have provided them with the tools, shared our culture and our aspirations, introduced some of our sales methodology and told them to get on with it. The results so far are beyond my expectations with 16-line items between them on the forecast. On top of this they are both good company and a pleasure to have in the team.
The Presales team is as busy as ever, but it finally feels right with the right people owning the right opportunities. Atif is busy primarily supporting Owen’s sales efforts in IoT and Andrew is mentoring and working on his own long list of opportunities typically being pulled in many directions but managing himself and his deliverables very well. Another success story.
Adrian is becoming my go-to person these days as I do very little without him by my side. The move from dark office and servers to the presales stage and the pressure that comes with that should not be under-estimated and the progress being made is so good to see. At Lee’s PLM event last week and congratulations to Lee for attracting over 25 people to the event, Adrian was a consummate professional and presented and demo’d with complete composure. Congratulations to Lee and Adrian.
At the end of the hottest week of the year and with plenty going on, we have cool heads and we are focussed on getting the best out of this quarter. No drama, no heroics, just joined up and committed teamwork.
I am firm believer that everyone ultimately gets exactly what they deserve so we will stay honest to ourselves and make sure we do deserve the success we get.
Good luck to everyone.
Julian
This is, hopefully, a short transcript of some events and changes over the last 25 years of a very interesting career.
Owen has recently talked about change and that you shouldn't be frightened of it. Hopefully, the following should highlight some changes that I have been through over the 25 years and show that opportunities should be grasped.
Like most of us here, we have spent time in other industries before switching back to the world of CAD/PLM solution providers.
I started out as an Engineering Apprentice in 1977. The first sight of any computing was punch card programming on a shared line with Birmingham University during my HNC.
I initially ended up as a Design Draughtsman (drawing board) at this company. First taste of CAD was in 1984 - a system where you booted the Operating System from the floppy drive (A), then loaded the CAD application from a newly inserted floppy into the A drive and saved your work to a floppy disk in the B drive. Amazingly, I believe that this system eventually became ME10 / ME30 which eventually became Creo Direct Modelling.
After a couple of moves I ended up designing gas cleaning equipment (dust extraction from Coal fired stations, Cement works, Gold mines etc.) using Computervision's Personal Designer. I had taken it on myself to read up on Operating Systems, networking etc. whilst travelling on the bus to work and ended up looking after the 10-seat system, training users, customising it and writing working practices. The system had been in place before I started there, and it was being used as an electronic drawing board. As it was a 2D/3D wireframe modelling system, I took it on myself to deliver a project using the 3D methods (against my bosses wishes). This project became the first that went out of the design office a month before schedule and the first on-site project to complete well inside costs with no on-site rework required. 3D was the way forward!
The CAD software was supplied by a company called Cimtel based on Aston Science Park in Birmingham and it came to my attention that they were after a trainer/demo jockey for Personal Designer. Interestingly, someone by the name of Phil Fellows had helped to setup Cimtel.
The deal was done and on 4th May 1994 I started at Cimtel with the proviso that I covered Computervision's Cadds5 product too. Fortunately, the command structure was the same as Personal Designer except Cadds5 ran on the unix platform. There was a lot of learning to do - Sun hardware, Operating systems (SunOS and Solaris) and getting to know Cadds5 inside out.
The internet was in its infancy, so communication was still done by letter and fax. Cadds5 has always been a subscription product so flexlm license files were issued annually and either printed out and faxed to customers, or for those not with faxes, reading the license codes over the phone to them!
Installations and Demonstrations were also part of the role which involved a great deal of travel as there was no remote access and customers tended not to have the expertise of dealing with unix and MS-DOS. Laptops? What are those? We had to hump around Sun Sparcstations and 21" CRT monitors to customer sites to deliver demonstrations. No wonder I have a bad back.
In 1997, Chris Dukes who was the majority owner of Alta Systems (based in West Bromwich), did a deal and bought up the CAD operation of Cimtel, maintaining the service of those that moved across with the business. Chris had previously worked as an AE at Cimtel.
Alta had originally been setup as an AutoDesk Reseller, but after seeing the opportunities with Cadds5 had started to deal with Computervision products, setting up a trading name of Concurrent Engineering for that part of the business.
Another change....... As Alta dealt with AutoDesk applications I had to pick up on AutoCad and Mechanical Desktop as well as dealing with Personal Designer and Cadds5. Not only that, Alta/Concurrent offered hardware support for the Cadds5 systems and with the advent of Autodesk Inventor, started to provide purpose-built PC's. Those of us who looked after Cadds5 were expected to be able to go on site at the drop of a hat and sort any hardware issues as well as assisting on the build of the custom PCs.
Things were moving in the industry which were out of our control.
Personal Designer was starting to drop off as a product. The code was written by a company called 4D graphics and was marketed/distributed by Computervision. 4D had code for a PC based Solid Modeller and Computervision chose not to market it - it would have been the first PC based solid modeller.
PTC's ProEngineer was making headroads in the market.
PTC were in the process of buying Computervision to acquire the Cadds5 customers.
AutoDesk brought out the first release of Inventor in 1999 - I picked up on this and saw it through to version 10 being an Inventor Certified Expert.
1999/2000 came and went. We were particularly busy in the December of 1999 applying patches to the Sun boxes as there was a panic over the year 2000 bug on unix operating systems (year dates only using 2 characters). We all crossed our fingers first day back in the New Year of 2000 hoping that customer's systems would start up fine.
In 2002 Chris Dukes approached Lee Edmunds and me, asking us if we wanted 'another string to our bow'. PTC had dropped Rand as the sole distributor of ProEngineer in the UK and were setting up a reseller channel to promote Wildfire (the new release of ProEngineer). We both jumped at the opportunity, Lee looking after the sales and me picking up the technical side of the product.
I was enrolled on an Introduction course at Warwick University and was taught ProEngineer 2001! So, when I got back to base it was learning Wildfire very quickly.
Lee and I then spent the next several years honing our skills and driving round the country trying to build a customer base from scratch. We were branded 'the dynamic duo' otherwise known as Batman and Robin.
Our first gain was Bristan taps (who had been contemplating Inventor) closely followed by Parweld.
One of our early achievements was a demo at Accrolite (a division of James Lister). We delivered the learned demo set and then the MD said that if we could model a specific piston with variable rounds disappearing to 0 then he would write a cheque to buy 2 seats of Wildfire. Catia had been in and had 2 weeks to come back to him with no feedback. I sat with the engineer who knew the product inside out and began to model what they were after. True to his word, we walked out with an order for 2 seats of Wildfire.
The next thing that arrived 'on my lap' in June 2005 was a product called Windchill. Windchill had been around since 1998 but version 8 was the first version we were to be involved with.
I was sent on a course on the intricacies of configuring a system.
I then returned to deep dive into this product so that we could offer our services to our customers.
Our first customer was a company called Gencoa. I had installed and configured a system on a server in our offices and then took it to see a PTC Global Services consultant, Dave Davidson at the PTC Coventry office. Dave had offered his services to assist as this was all new to us. On meeting him he asked what type of data the customer was going to manage, to which I said Widfire CAD data. "What's Wildfire", was Dave's response!! Dave was totally involved in Windchill and had never had any involvement in any CAD products - this was going to be a steep learning curve for both of us!
The next thing that came along was migrating customers from the ProIntralink data manager over to Windchill. Yet another steep learning curve as we had won a large order to deliver such a project. I had never worked with ProIntralink so there was a lot of reading up to do.
The business was now growing, and extra staff being taken on.
Then in 2008, Chris Dukes announced to Lee and me that he wanted to start winding down and was looking to sell Concurrent Engineering. The company was put out to tender.
It came down to 2 interested parties in the end - Inneo and Honeycomb - both of which were offering very similar financial deals so it came down to who Lee and myself felt would take the business in the right direction. The decision was an easy one and in March 2009 Mr. Kirby and Mr. Quinlan became the owners of Concurrent Engineering.
Since then there have been acquisitions of other resellers. Julian joined us before Optima were bought, which gave rise to Andrew and Adrian joining forces with us. Gavin decided to fly the nest and join PTC in Boston.
The years have flown by. There have been stressful times and there have been times when I have thought "what am I doing here?". But I have found the whole time enjoyable, challenging and interesting.
Here's to the next 9 years! (or 7)
I overheard a group of 18-year olds talking about what they wanted to do for a living whilst on holiday last year and they asked my advice. Of the things we discussed, one thing I said to them was; ‘The job that you are doing in 25 years may not exist yet’.
Words ... Who needs them? Let’s focus on the visualisations, since we work in the virtual world.
Figure 1 Icebreaker
Red, simply because of the race winning Ferraris. The fastest cars I’ve owned, have also been red.
Malta, a small but beautiful Mediterranean island that’s clean, not too hot and has fantastic people
Manchester United
A question I get asked a lot in professional life is always why you have a Spanish name and seemingly people get confused thinking it’s my surname. Unfortunately like most things in life the facts aren’t as exciting as the fiction. Like most people that are named after celebrities and musicians, so am I. A little-known Jamaican artist using “Sanchez” as his stage name.
As you may have guessed by the greatest of all the midlands area accents, I have grown up in Wolverhampton and I still live there now. As for things I enjoy they tend to revolve around fast cars, fast sports and weightlifting.
Professionally I have worked in mainly automotive and the engineering software sectors. Starting out as a CAD engineer using Solidworks, and then progressing down the Project manager / Lead engineer routes using the other big CAD systems. Over the last 8 years where I have picked up a varied set of skills, from delivering the design and build of emergency vehicles to training engineers on how to best use VR to aid automotive design reviews. With my last role, I was responsible for the concept & systems delivery for a futured vehicle traction battery and overall powertrain package.
8th – Karen
21st – Andrew
24th - Sanchez
15th - Jane
1st - Julian
18th Matt B
| Thursday 3rd October From 4 pm onwards An activity/evening out |
Thursday 19th December
From 3 pm onwards |
