Paul Evans is founder of Minderaa leading global software development company based in the UK. Mindera operates without job titles or hierarchies and allows its employees to take on projects across different business areas. The company has a turnover of £85 million and has offices in London, Leicester, Portugal, the USA and India. Its clients include Selfridges, Trainline and New Look.
I had a bad stutter as a child and it was always important to me that everyone was treated equally. At Mindera, everyone gets the same bonus regardless of location, no one has their own office and everyone is a shareholder.
It all goes back to my first boss, Sandra Barrie. I had a BTEC in computer science but decided at 18 that I wasn’t ready for a degree. I joined the civil service in 1988 because I wanted to be a software developer but back then you needed a degree to be able to write code, so I started in the finance department in Plymouth.
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One day, the technical manager asked me to create a simple Word spreadsheet. At the time, the offices only had a big PC in the corner that nobody used. My job was sorting letters for the team and running errands during the day, but Sandra, a senior manager, saw what I could do and offered me a job in technical work.
She had to break through all sorts of barriers at the top of the civil service to give me this opportunity. I get emotional thinking about it now because I wouldn’t be where I am today if she hadn’t championed me. I stayed in the civil service for eight years and left as a senior software developer.
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 public service.
Sandra has had a big influence on the way I work today. At Mindera, there are no clocks because people should invest in the results of their work and not in the time they spend on it.
Sandra supported me in group meetings because of my stuttering. I had interesting points to make and she helped me to get them across. It’s easy to pay more attention to people who talk or stand out more in a group, so now I’m always on the lookout for people who are quieter and perhaps more deserving.
Later, when I knew I was leaving Betfair Group in 2014, I told my wife that I did not want to go back to a corporate job and compete with the big guys.
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I knew I had what it takes to go into business on my own and 10 years after launching, we are a successful private equity (PE)-backed business now operating in Australia. Most PEs would have asked me to spend six months doing due diligence and predicting the amount of business we could win, but I said Australia was the right fit for us and we just did it.
We were not afraid of the unknown and faced the problems as they arose. This is a huge compliment to CBPE (our PE supporters) and to John Lane (friend and chairman) who trust, support and guide us.
We start by understanding what our client wants to do. I spend a lot of time getting to know people, but I don’t focus on selling them anything. I just try to understand what they want to do and how we can help them do it. Our turnover will be £85 million and that’s entirely down to the relationships we have with our clients.
I travel to our offices around the world because I want to be accessible. I also communicate with 1,200 employees across the group four times a week.
I always share because I want people to know what we’re doing next, what I’m thinking and what my fears are because this is a challenging time in the industry. Again, it’s reminiscent of my time in public service where people could say what they thought.
The reason I don’t like job titles is because people come to me and say, “I’m the COO, I must be something.” I don’t doubt that people have to have had a great career to achieve that. But I want people to be seen for the work they do, not their status, and that’s very important.
An engineer in India might have an old desktop computer that costs £250, while a colleague in Portugal has a nice silver Mac. I wanted everyone to have the same, so I also kept an eye on our expenses to make sure we were spending the same amount on the same quality of food everywhere.
This has nothing to do with the fact that we are not a corporate structure, but rather a self-organized structure, but rather with the fact that I want everyone to feel comfortable and no one to feel like a second-class citizen.
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I never really thought 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 as young as 12 who live in foster homes. I know life can be a struggle for them and I want to give them opportunities.
Sandra’s husband at the time was also my boss in the civil service for a time. At a meeting with superiors, someone asked me if I could become a director at some point and he said “no” because I stuttered so badly.
But Sandra saw through it, saw me as a person and what I could become. I think she would be incredibly proud of what I am today.
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