Nick Earle tells us that hiring the right people and treating them with respect is the best way to grow your business.
What do you currently do?
I am the CEO of Eseye. We are Amazon Web Services’ global strategic partner for connecting IoT devices over cellular communication. We are a rapidly growing UK based start-up with 1500 customers round the world and have around 2 million devices under management.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
Our founders created the Zigbee communication protocol that is used in billions of devices around the world. They realised that the Cellular SIM card-based model could never give 100% global connectivity out of the box for every device.
The only way to achieve this would be to create a network switching as a service platform in the cloud that could connect any device to any network anywhere. This would have huge advantages for customers such as the ability to have one global SKU for every IoT enabled product. So that’s what they built and that’s why AWS selected Eseye to power their IoT strategy.
Who do you admire?
Lots of people but if I had to pick one I would say David Attenborough. I think that, due to the global awareness he is raising around pollution and global warming, he will go down in history as one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived.
Looking back is there anything you would have done differently?
Lots of things! But failure is the best teacher there is. When I mentor people, I say the biggest mistake is not taking a risk in the first place. Every job I have ever had, every major event that has influenced my life can all be traced back to proactively putting myself out there on the edge.
What defines your way of doing business?
If you hire the right people, treat them with respect and give them a clear vision of where you want them to go. If you stand back and avoid micro-managing them, then they will exceed not only your expectations, but theirs too.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Everybody in life has an invisible badge with words on it. They describe how they are perceived by everybody around them, and this is what drives their career just as much as their job performance versus objectives.
The key questions are… 1) Do you know what is written on your badge? and 2). Are you, through you actions and time allocation, actively influencing those words or are others determining them? In my experience most people have never spent the time to either think about this or do anything about it. Once the light goes on it becomes second nature and their career as well as their job satisfaction accelerates.
