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How can you separate Madonna’s Superbowl show from our first nightclub install in Ipswich in 2001?
JAMES ROSS HERON SALES & MARKETING DIRECTOR OF GREEN HIPPO
What were you doing before Green Hippo? Rod Stewart’s body double. Okay, the fact is I still fail to see the similarity every morning but I feel duty bound to humour the numerous people who disagree at every industry ‘do’ I attend.
There are not many other companies to which Green Hippo can be compared, but what qualities make the company unique? Some years ago we ran a marketing strapline: ‘Funny Name... Serious Kit’. It’s stuck with us to a degree as a definition of what we are. We take our products very seriously but we don’t apply the same idea to ourselves. On a day to day basis, over 11 years, I think Green Hippo has accidentally created a little business oasis where we encourage creativity, enthusiasm and embrace ideas whilst maintaining good commercial sensibilities based on fulfilment of goals rather than world domination business strategies. Don’t get me wrong, Green Hippo is no hippie commune and we are ambitious but the success is a by-product of being true to ourselves in many ways.
Last year you made the decision to reorganise your dealer structure in Asia, and ran your first Asian Distributor Seminar in the UK. What advantages has this decision delivered? If you want a standard corporate statement littered with words like ‘strategic approach’ and ‘global positioning’ I’m afraid I can’t deliver. It has been a venture into something new for us and despite claiming to be well travelled I’m ashamed to say I personally set foot on Asian soil for the first time
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in Spring 2011 all wide-eyed and ready for a new challenge. I would imagine in business terms the advantages of restructuring our Asia strategy are obvious but as a company, arriving in uncharted business and cultural waters with no preconceptions and applying the same approach we have on other continents has proved fulfilling both commercially and personally. We only had one rule, which was to make sure we did more listening than talking and we think we now have a very strong platform to do something successful there. The results so far seem to support this theory.
You recently employed two new software developers, how will they strengthen the Green Hippo brand? Our development team and support team are now equal in size which makes their employment somewhat of a metaphor for our company’s belief that the effort you expend after you’ve sold product should at least equal what you put in before.
Tell us about your latest product developments, and what influence these will have on the industry? Green Hippo is at an interesting point in its evolution. We’ve taken on board new staff to afford product developers the luxury of experimenting with new ideas and even dabble with the ludicrous to encourage new product lines, new elements for existing products and ultimately new avenues for Green Hippo. Innovation is a word that is thrown around far too easily in our industry but we aim to justify that mantle by applying the above strategy.
What is your favourite Green Hippo project to date? Always a tough question. How can you separate Madonna’s Superbowl show from our first nightclub install in Ipswich in 2001? They all have a fond place in our hearts. Some of the proudest moments weren’t necessarily the biggest ones. If I had to pick the first one that springs to mind it would be Cate Carter’s award for the Editors design in 2010. To see a user get such a fantastic show out of such a tight budget by some head-scratching followed by delving into the software and doing something new is often more rewarding as a manufacturer than an Edwin Shirley truck with four racks of servers and an arena stage shrouded in LED. I’ll happily take both though, thank you very much.
What is the highlight of your career? I sometimes look around the company these days and remember the excitement of opening the box containing our first printer back in 2002. The office was so small we had to put it on top of the filing cabinet and it spat pages out onto the floor. I used to open the top drawer to catch them!
Where do you hope to be in 20 years time? I’d like to think we’d be halfway up a hill wearing our Green Hippo hoodies looking back at a winding mountain road snaking up towards us thinking ‘hey, I didn’t think we’d make it around a few of those bends but that was fun’. I hope we’d all then turn and plan the best way up the next part of the hill!
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