Yahoo Finance ‘I want my staff to feel good’: The company that operates without job titles or clocks
My First Boss: The people who helped shape business leaders
Paul Evans is founder of 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 revenue of £85m, the company has offices including London, Leicester, Portugal, the US and India with clients like Selfridges, Trainline and New Look.
I had a bad childhood stammer and I’ve always felt it important for everyone to be treated equally. At Mindera, everyone gets the same bonus wherever they are, no-one has their own office and everyone is a shareholder.
It all harks back to my first boss, Sandra Barrie. I did a computer science BTEC but, aged 18, decided I wasn’t ready to do a degree. 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 tech director asked me to do a simple Word spreadsheet. These were the days when offices had one big PC in the corner that no one used. My job was to sort out letters for the team and run errands during the day but Sandra, who was a higher executive officer, saw what I could do and offered me a job in tech.
She had to break down all sorts of barriers at the top of the civil service to give me that opportunity. I get emotional thinking about it now as I would not be where I am today if she hadn't stuck her neck out on my behalf. I stayed in the civil service for eight years and left as a principal 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 has had a massive influence on how I work today. At Mindera there are no clocks, as people should invest in the outcomes of the work as opposed to how much 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 pay more attention to people who talk or stand out more in a group and so today I always look out for people who are quieter and perhaps deserve more.
Later, when I knew I was going to leave the Betfair Group in 2014, I remember saying to 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 I had it in me to strike out on my own and 10 years from launch we are a successful private equity (PE) backed company, with business now in Australia. Most PEs would have asked me to do six months of due diligence and forecast the amount of business we could win. But I said that Australia was right for us and we just did it.
We didn't fear the unknown and we dealt with the problems as they came along. This is a massive compliment to CBPE (our PE backers) and to John Lane (friend and chairperson) who trust, support and guide us.
We start by understanding what our client wants to do. A lot of my time is spent meeting people but I'm not focussing on selling to them, I just try and understand what they want to do, and how we can help them do it. Our revenue will be £85m and that’s purely because of the relationships we have with our clients.
I travel to our offices across the globe as I want to be available. I also communicate four times per week to 1,200 staff across the group.
I always share as I want people to know what we are doing next, what I am thinking and what fears I have, as this is a challenging time in the industry. Again it points to my time at the civil service where people could say what they think.
The reason I don’t like job titles is that people come in saying ‘I am the COO, I must be something'. I don’t doubt that people must have had a great career to achieve that. But I want people to be seen for the work they do, not because of the status they have and that’s very important.
An engineer in India might have an old desktop machine costing £250, whereas a colleague in Portugal would have a beautiful silver Mac. I wanted everyone to have the same and so I would also look at our spend to make sure we were spending the same amount of money on the same quality of food in every location.
That’s nothing to do with the fact that we are a self-organised structure rather than the normal corporate, more that I want everyone to feel good and no one to feel like a second-class citizen.
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I never really thought about my view of the world until I was in my mid forties and I realised what Sandra had done for my early career. Today, we have a programme where we teach kids aged 12+ who live in institutional care. I appreciate that life can be a struggle for them and want to give them opportunities.
Sandra’s husband at the time was at some point also my boss in the civil service. In a senior meeting, someone asked if I could be a director one day and he said ‘no’ as my stammer was so bad.
But Sandra saw straight through that, saw me as a human being and who I could become. I think she would be incredibly proud of where I am today.
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