20 entrepreneurs Wired for success
In the male-dominated tech sector, Lisa Hammond is a rare breed: a female CEO and co-founder of a software company, Centrix Software. Not only that, under her guidance the company is growing at break-neck speed as it expands across Europe, the US and further afield. Eleanor Harris discovered how Hammond, a techie who started life fixing telex machines, made it all happen
Lisa Hammond is CEO and co-founder of Centrix Software, a leading provider of workspace computing solutions, headquartered in Newbury. She was born and grew up on the Berkshire-Hampshire borders, studied physics and electronic engineering at Reading University and received her business education from the Harvard Business School, US. Hammond and her business partner, Jon Fuller, founded Centrix in 1997 as a consultancy practice, and in 2008 launched Centrix Software as a separate business.
In 2011 the company more than doubled its revenue and opened a US corporate headquarters in Boston, and it currently has 70 employees and more than 500 customers for its software product range, Centrix WorkSpace. Last year it was named a Red Herring Top 100 Global company in recognition of its innovations and technologies.
Why did you set up Centrix?
Before Centrix I ran Europe for a US technology company. When you work for a US technology company you work all day and all night, and I was about 30 and I’d had my children – my little boy was 18 months old and my daughter was six months old – and I just couldn’t work all day and all night, so I decided to leave that company and set up my own company. It was all about flexibility and being able to spend more time with the children. I’ve never been nervous about it – I’m a reasonably brave person, and I never really have a question of whether it will work or not, I just assume it will work, you’ve just got to do it.
It’s rare to find a woman starting and running a software company. How have you found running a business as a woman in this industry?
I don’t even think about it. We have quite a few women working here, we have women on the management team – we’re almost 50:50 in that respect. I didn’t start a technology company thinking “I am a woman”, I don’t run my business thinking “I am a woman”, I’m just Lisa. And maybe because I don’t think about it I never feel any prejudice. Maybe there’s less of it around in our generation, I just don’t think about it.
Have you always worked in the technology industry?
I studied electronic engineering at university which I guess was relatively unusual in those days, I think there were only three girls on my course. After leaving uni I pretty much went straight into the technology field. I started life fixing telex machines. So I started as a techie, then sales, then marketing, then managerial, and then started my own company, so I guess I’ve had a little bit of everything.
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How did you go about establishing the company?
I set up Centrix as part of another company in 1997 and then I completely bought out the company a year and a half later, so it was more like a MBO than starting the business with nothing at all. The company that I set it up as part of were very supportive, so I had a really nice, soft start. By the time I’d bought the company out we already had customers, money in the bank and a great team hired. And so then I was able to grow it and scale it from that.
Can you tell me about the growth of the company since then?
We ran the company as a services company until 2008 – we’ve always worked with very large customers, Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 customers, and we specialised in virtualisation skills, desktop transformation, software asset management, IT strategy and management consultancy, so that enabled us to grow the company – it was very profitable, it was a really nice business, but the market was beginning to scale, so in 2008 we decided that instead of following a services route we would follow an IP route and therefore we really needed to create the software business. So we
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – MAY 2012
made that decision – if anybody ever had told me how hard that was going to be, I’d never have done it. But we put about £5 million into starting up the software business and then hired an absolutely brilliant team, and we put the product out to market at the end of 2010. Now, we have about 70 people in the company so far but we’ve got around 30 open vacancies so we’re growing really quickly, we’ve got about 500 customers for the software, and we’re really close to our millionth ‘seat’, which is phenomenal for a software company at our stage. We incorporated in the US last year and hired our first team of people there, we look at the first stage of growth in the US as five regions of which we’ve started two, we have four more regions to open up in Europe, and we’ll then look east, rather than west, as well. We have a free version of our product which is downloaded all around the world so that will help us pinpoint the regions we staff up. We
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