Cloud, Culture and the Bionic Business – an interview with Keith McMurtrie from Tharstern
We were recently joined by Keith McMurtrie, CEO of Tharstern and we asked him about their print MIS software, the culture Tharstern has developed and why being a bionic business is so important.
Keith, what is your background and how did you get into the print sector?
I fell in love with computing when I was about 12 and my grandfather bought a Commodore VIC 20. After months of saving and buying one myself, I knew immediately that this was what I wanted to do. So at 16, I got a job as a video games developer working on Amstrad machines, back in the day of Youth Training Schemes. Later I decided I wanted to broaden my knowledge and get into the world of business software development. I saw an advert in the paper asking for someone with coding experience, network operating systems and so on, and thought I’d go and give that a whirl.
I went for the interview, got the job and figured, well if I only do this for 12 months, I’ll have gained valuable experience before I go back into games. That job was for Tharstern in April 1991. Fast forward to now and I’m still here!
How did Tharstern come about, what is the backstory of the business?
There was no Mr Tharstern or anything like that. The business was actually started by Keith Harrison, a cost and management accountant for a printing company, who was absolutely obsessed with the importance of knowing your costs and the value coming into your business. He’d often look at jobs they’d done and notice mistakes being made, so would keep record of this by handwriting all the costs sheets out.
His son-in-law was a little like me, developing his passion for computing. Keith bought him a Commodore PET and said, do you think you could write something on one of these ‘newfangled computer things’ that would help in capturing these costs? So he got to work writing what was the beginnings of an estimating system in a Commodore platform, and Keith showed everyone in the business. They thought it was great, but told him to get it running on a PC if he wanted it to make it into a business.
So, he got himself a YTS programmer (his son-in-law didn’t want to join at the time, happy with his own business) and some free premises in the back of a local coal shed and there, Tharstern was born.
So where did the name come from?
Keith Harrison was an accountant, and notoriously cost-conscious, so when he started the company, he just went to Companies House, got an off-the-shelf company name and stuck with it.
By the time he decided he’d spend the few quid to get the name changed, it was too late because Tharstern had stuck. So that’s where it came from, nothing too exciting!
So about estimating, Keith Harrison had obviously worked out there was a problem to be solved with some technology that enabled people to estimate the cost of things, automated and removed some of the work from the hardware. Has this remained one of the core products of the business?
Yes, it has. MIS stands for Management Information System, with a key focus on the word management. I always say if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it, and that’s what an MIS enables a business to do. Measure things so you can manage them better. Producing an estimate is basically the same as producing a bill of materials – you’re saying you need this amount of material, labour and process and then saying how much all that is going to cost you.
Before MIS software came out, people were always missing key parts of these costs, which was a huge problem.
What MIS software also does is give you a volume of information that you can look back on to measure how your business is performing, which products are successful, which aren’t so successful, what are the margins, what’s the value added that you bring into the business.
Initially, they were nothing more than glorified calculators - the real power came from the management reporting. But these days, MIS software has evolved into something much more. Now it plays a pivotal role in controlling and managing the whole business workflow, from inquiry to shipment, while still capturing information along the way that helps with managing your business and making a strategic decision.
It’s not a silver bullet, it can’t make strategic decisions for you, but it provides you with an accurate tool so you can manage it. Whilst MIS is the term we all know, perhaps Business Workflow Software is a more appropriate description these days.
Does this solution give you a really up-to-date dashboard on how you’re doing as a business and like you say it doesn’t make strategic decisions, it only gives you the information basis to make those decisions?
Absolutely, it’s a great rear-view mirror for helping you make business decisions going forward, but also providing more of that quick update information that controls the workplace. It’s a central hub, a key tool that helps printers run their business efficiently.
Are there print businesses today that don’t have workflow software such as this?
Some smaller companies manage generic off-the-shelf software products. It’s still an MIS, so it’s doing the same thing, but it’s not sector-specific where it has the right terminology that they understand and a flow of information through the business.
You’ve got to try and remove as many steps as possible, and workflow software enables you to do that. There aren’t many greenfield sites out there now, but there are some.
What you’re saying is, that there aren’t many, but there are a number of people that don’t really optimise the use of leveraging software for key tasks?
Yes, there are some very small print businesses that don’t have that need yet, but they will still be using something. I can’t imagine there are many people still quoting at price per 1000 off the top of their head.
Before software, they’d do something crazy like figure out the cost of the substrate required to produce the print, then double it. That was their system.
What makes Tharstern different to other companies that might claim to provide an MIS solution as well?
The Tharstern product has been around for a long time, and it’s got a plethora of functionality in there. I mean, I sometimes forget how comprehensive it actually is! I don’t get as actively involved in that side of the business as I used to, but when I go out to customers the functionality never ceases to amaze me. It covers all the different types of products from large format, packaging, and commercial. We’ve recently launched a cloud solution, a true cloud-native product, that offers unrivalled connectivity, but there’s something else in there that’s just as important as the machines, and that’s employee engagement.
At Tharstern, we have a team of very clever industry experts and a strong people culture that we continually measure and encourage. We pride our success, nine times out of ten, on the way our people have engaged with the prospect during sales engagement.
We’ve invested heavily in our own employee engagement programme, it’s not just about software for us, people are a huge part of that. It leads to a bionic culture, which is the power of technology driven by the power of people.
In fact, our mission is to guide our customers through the technological evaluation of the print industry, we very much believe in bringing people and technology together. We’ve seen it improve team performance and motivation.
The printing industry, which as you’ve already said, has evolved hugely in the time you’ve been involved, what do you see as the main challenges for the print sector?
Well, I think companies need to be technologically minded. We’ve seen the evolution they’re going through, which is still accelerating now. Technology in itself isn’t a cure-all. The challenge is that print buyers are demanding that organisations understand the technology they want to engage with, so printers need to have a technological focus and use technology to find solutions.
Companies should have Chief Technology Officers who make sure they’ve got the right technology and understand how it interfaces with the rest of the organisation, because if incorrectly chosen, new technology can create bottlenecks rather than helping.
We’ve talked about industry 4.0, but frankly, we’re not embracing it to its full potential. We’re living in industry 4.0 right now, we can’t get away from it because people demand it, especially the new people joining the industry and expecting to be able to connect one product to another.
That actually brings with it another challenge for a lot of companies. More and more people expect to be able to connect products together at the click of a button, but this causes decentralisation and things can get a little out of control. It can cause real security risks for lots of businesses.
There’s also the standardisation of software. To get around that, there are platforms trying to find a plug-and-play way to work together, which is great for companies that haven’t got the technical resource available to them. But when you standardise systems, you’re only as good as your weakest component in that standard link. If you’re using the same information and just passing it down the chain using standard communication, it’s not capturing the values you’ll want to describe, and you can’t take advantage. Technology needs to be brought in-house to work it out strategically.
So a strategic approach by recognising software as a strategic investment rather than just a cure for one problem makes the difference. As you say, you expedite one process at the expense of a bottleneck and create other problems. So from what you’re saying, then having that CTO or recognising a senior person, in the business responsible for the technology rollout would enhance or optimise your success?
Yes, we’ve all seen that smart use of technology brings opportunity. You can’t be naïve about the role technology plays in your organisation, it’s something you have to do because if not, it’s a real challenge. Nobody can just print anymore, they have to be a technology company too.
And you think this is challenging a lot of the people in the industry?
Yes. Maybe the pandemic has made them recognise this even more, but they are recognising that they need to do it, and they want to utilise the opportunity. But people do still have unrealistic expectations about it, so it’s still a bit of a journey.
It’s almost like a circle, you’ve got to keep circling back and reviewing that use of technology, how it’s working for you, and you’ve got to involve your people. So whilst I say you need someone to bring it all together, your whole team needs to be involved in using that technology.
Technology isn’t something you can put in and forget about it, it needs to be enhanced, maintained, and looked after like a member of your team.
You touched on ideas and changes, perhaps that you have noticed and developed. What initiatives have you put in place during the pandemic? And what were the results?
These are peculiar times, and we were very fortunate that we could work from home. Around 40% of our business was field-based before the pandemic anyway. Basically, we picked up our laptops, went to work from home and found it actually worked. We became a remote-first business, which is probably something we’d wanted to do for a long time. So engaging with customers, and rolling out systems, we’ve had to put technology in place to do that.
What was more difficult was employee engagement. All of a sudden, the culture we’ve built up always being together became very difficult. We really had to ramp up our communication initiatives with our staff just to make sure everybody knew what was happening and pushed those regular updates because there was lots of uncertainty.
With our customers, we gave away some free software that they could use to help with connectivity, we put a freeze on revenue, we had to put a lot of things in place to find the ‘new normal’. So yeah, we introduced new business practices and it’s been positive.
Do you think you will keep remote work as we move out of the pandemic?
Yes. The buzzword that’s bandied around is hybrid working, isn’t it? I see the value of that. It’s not ideal all going home and never getting together, you lose those water cooler moments and lose creative opportunities, so we need to still have that available.
Working from home helps with having a work/home balance, we’ve not seen any reduction in productivity and in fact, we’ve seen a slight increase in sales engagements.
Talking digitally is a good way to start the engagement, but then we’d much rather travel to meet clients for a coffee after that. Similarly with implementation, getting out and seeing customers. So we’re not going to stay 100% remote, we want to bring that hybrid approach.
I think you’re right. I think creativity doesn’t really exist, when you kind of go, oh, let’s book a session in the calendar or be creative in that half an hour. It’s like, you don’t get what I call the serendipity moment, you get that more when you’re with people.
Absolutely, some people just need others there to help them. You can get people on a Zoom or a Teams meeting, and people who would normally be very contributory to a discussion in person seem to clam up virtually and don’t come forward with any ideas.
In terms of communicating with customers, there’s a time we were trying to resolve a problem remotely with little success. So we jumped in the car, sat around a table together and listened, soaking up the environment. We resolved it. If we’d not been to see them face to face, we’d have no idea why it wasn’t solvable. People are important, we mustn’t lose sign of having that face-to-face experience.
How important are people to Tharstern? Because obviously, you are a technology business, that technology doesn’t exist without people.
A few years ago we put together a five-year strategy, and we asked ourselves what’s the most important part of our business? We all independently came up with the answer of people, which spawned an entire strategy around people and employee engagement within our organisation.
We introduced more social activities and introduced a ‘staff ethos’ – a language so people could communicate using simple phrases that describe more complex but important concepts. Things like ‘Disagree and commit’ which was introduced to help staff get buy-in to something that is being heavily debated but they feel passionate about. Asking someone to ‘disagree and commit’ to what you’re saying means, ‘you might not agree with me, but commit to my idea and support me and put your faith in me’. There’s also ‘make high-velocity decisions’, ‘embrace change’, ‘never stop learning about your craft’, and perhaps most importantly ‘have fun’. The ethos has really blossomed and paid off.
We also introduced software that periodically sends a survey to staff to gauge their level of happiness. We ask about certain facets of the business, their working life at Tharstern, relationships with colleagues and managers, and other things that highlight what areas we need to work on.
During the pandemic, we worked more on mental wellbeing. We joined organisations, introduced mental health champions, physical wellness activities, and all those scores relating to happiness and motivation went up. What’s interesting is that we posted on our social media about the different activities we did, and we found the number of unsolicited CV’s from all over the world increased dramatically because this communicated well and people felt this was the type of company they wanted to work for. We introduced a four-and-a-half-day working week too; all of this has created a really positive vibe.
And what is the Bionic Business you’ve talked about?
The problem with technology, people tend to implement it and forget about it. You need to treat your technology and employees in the same way. It needs a champion who’s making sure that it’s performing, because it’s probably costing you a lot of money. If you’d hired an individual costing you lots of money, you’d make sure they were working and performing effectively.
There’s a really interesting TED Talk on this subject from Nadjia Youssef who works for Boston Consulting Group and that’s exactly what she talks about. You need to review your technology, give it an owner, find out where it fits into the culture of the organisation. Getting your people right is part one, getting your technology right is part two, and making sure they work together is part three, which I say is the process. In our view, that’s where your business becomes bionic. This is done by constantly reviewing it. Make sure the people in your team play a role in defining it.