In his early days playing first grade rugby, John Grant discovered the knack for ducking and weaving which has carried him through IT business for more than two decades.
Since first joining Australian IT integration organisation Data#3 in 1983 (he is now managing director), he has seen some impressive market shifts, from the launch of the first IBM PC and the predominance of hardware, through the rise and fall of Australian OEM empires as the price screws tightened, and held on with white knuckles as the dot-com disaster sucked the company's share price into a boom and bust vacuum.
As with many in the IT industry, Grant spent the last few years of the 90's announcing his company's profit increases of over 10 percent, and paying attractive dividends or around 5.5 cents per share, to record a AU$4.262 million loss in the first 12 months of the new millennium, and a corresponding plunge in the share price.
"We have bottomed out now," Grant says. "We suffered along with the Dells and the HPs because we had focussed the company on IT infrastructure when the market was growing. The drivers just aren't there anymore, there is not enough revenue to be got."
Down but not out, Grant has strategically realigned the Data#3 business model in order to capture growth areas. Rather than shooting for a single area of expertise the company has fostered skills in a series of markets including product procurement, infrastructure integration, recruitment and contracting, applications development, managed services and IT consulting and development.
"If you look across the listed IT companies in Australia, many of them have a very focussed business model, and those that are doing well are doing so because their sector is growing at the moment," Grant said. "We have tried to drive much more toward specialisation without loosing out broad market approach."
Trained as a civil engineer, and starting out life in first grade rugby Grant came across computers soon after retiring from his sporting career and went to just about the only place where data processing was to be found in the late 70's - IBM. After three years in a blue blazer, he moved on to a small Australian company busily developing software applications in what was very much an emerging market.
"At that time Data#3 was a software consultancy," Grant said. "But we totally changed our focus with the launch of the IBM PC in 1984."
The initial decision to move from a software to a hardware focus was the right one, PC sales were embarking on a growth period set to last two decades. By 1996 Data#3 was pushing the limits of organic growth and looking for opportunities to capitalise and expand through acquisition.
"We listed before it was vogue to list," Grant said. "We made the decision based on the right rationale, to allow growth through raising capital, we came with sound objectives, and we achieved them."
According to Grant, the months of due diligence in the lead up to Data#3's launch on the ASX provided insight into the cultural changes that would follow.
"There are significant cultural changes associated with the listed environment, it is a difficult change to make, especially for those people not educated in a public company environment," Grant said.
And the cultural changes associated with listing were only the beginning. As Data#3 continued along its stated path of growth through acquisition Grant over saw the integration of three separate companies.
"There are two ways of handling acquisitions," Grant said. "You can acquire organisations and allow them to continue to run as separate entities within your company, or you can fully integrate the company into your own operations."
Data#3's acquisition path saw them do the latter, and while he can speak of 'best practice' goals now, he concedes that combining the cultures of two companies is never an easy task.
"You need to take the best of both companies and consolidate the resources needed to support it, and at the same time you need to look after the morale, I can give you the best practice stuff now because I have been through it all, but it is never an easy process," Grant said.
And neither is dealing with speculator based stock price movements. Among the hardest lessons Data#3 has learnt in the last 12 months is how to maintain morale in the face of stock price shocks.
"We tell our staff not to ride the stock market roller coaster, but they are clearly affected when people who don't even know the company or what we do know what is happening with our share price," Grant said. "Again it is a question of culture, you need to be able to put your head down and get on with business."
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