by Paul Evans is the founder Mindera, a leading global software engineering company based in the UK. Mindera operates without job titles or hierarchy and allows people to take on projects in different parts of the business. With revenues of £85m, the company has offices in London, Leicester, Portugal, San Francisco and India with clients such as Selfridges, Trainline and New Look.
I had a bad childhood and always felt that it was important to treat everyone equally. At Mindera, everyone gets the same bonus wherever they are, no one has their own office and everyone is a shareholder.
It goes back to my first boss, Sandra Barrie. I did a BTEC computer science but, aged 18, decided I wasn’t ready to graduate. In 1988, I joined the civil service wanting to be a software developer but at the time you had to have a degree to write code. So I started out in the finance department in Plymouth.
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One day the technology director asked me to make a simple Word spreadsheet. These were the days when offices had one big computer in the corner that nobody used. My job was to sort out letters for the staff and run errands during the day but Sandra, who was a more senior executive officer, saw what I could do and offered me a job in technology.
She had to break down all sorts of barriers at the top of the civil service to give me that opportunity. I think about it emotionally now because I wouldn’t be where I am today if she hadn’t stuck her neck over me. I stayed in the civil service for eight years and left as a chief software engineer.
Sandra cared and wanted to help. A stable, healthy and happy environment like the one she created creates more productive people. And it wasn’t about watching the clock, which is strange in the civil service.
Sandra had a huge impact on the way I work today. There are no clocks at Mindera, because people should invest in the results of the work rather than the amount of time they spend on it.
Sandra supported me in group meetings because of my stammer. I would have interesting points to make and she would help me get them across. It’s easy to give more attention to people who talk or stand out in a group so today I always look out for people who are quieter and perhaps more deserving.
Later, when I knew I was going to leave the Betfair Group in 2014, I remember telling my wife that I didn’t want to go back to a corporate job and compete with the big players .
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I knew it was in me to strike out on my own and 10 years since launch we now have a successful private equity (PE) company in Australia. Most of the PE asked me to do six months of due diligence and predict the amount of business we could achieve. But I said Australia was right for us and we just did it. We were not afraid of the unknown and dealt with the problems as they came.
We start by understanding what our client wants to do. A lot of my time is spent meeting people but I don’t focus on selling to them, I try to understand what they want to do, and how we can help them do it. Our income will be £85m and that is only because of the relationship we have with our clients.
I travel to our offices around the globe because I want to be available. I also communicate four times a week with 1,200 staff across the group.
I always share because I want people to know what we’re doing next, what I’m thinking and what my concerns are, because this is a challenging time in the industry. Again it reflects my time in the civil service where people could have their say.
The reason I don’t like job titles is because people come in saying ‘I’m the CEO, I must be something’. I have no doubt that people had a great career to achieve that. But I want people to be seen for the work they do, not because of their status and that is very important.
An engineer in India might have an old desktop machine costing £250, but a colleague in Portugal would have a beautiful silver Mac. I wanted everyone to have the same thing so I would also look at our spending to make sure we were spending the same amount of money on the same quality of food in each location.
That has nothing to do with the fact that we are a self-organized structure as opposed to the typical corporation, more that I want everyone to feel good and no one to feel like a second-class citizen.
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I didn’t really think about my worldview until I was in my mid-forties and realized what Sandra had done for my early career. Today, we have a program where we teach children 12+ who are on the autism spectrum. I understand that life can be a struggle for them and I want to give them opportunities.
Sandra’s husband was at the time and he was also my boss in the civil service at some point. In a senior meeting, someone asked if I could be a director one day and he said ‘no’ because my stammer was so bad.
But Sandra saw right through that, saw me as a human being and who I could be. I think she would be very proud of where I am today.
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