20 entrepreneurs
From the school of hard knocks to making millions
A chance remark from a recruitment consultant and the promise of earning “big money” sent Greg Harris on the road to joining the fledging IT industry in the 1980s. Fast forward a few decades and today he is sales director of Cloud Distribution, the company he co-founded with business partner, Scott Dobson, in 2009. With a turnover last year of £9.7 million, the company employs 19 people and recently moved to new, larger premises in Green Park, Reading. Earlier this year the business, which specialises in bringing new, innovative and disruptive security and networking solutions to market, was placed fourth in the annual Sunday Times listing of the UK’s 100 fastest growing private technology businesses and has won many of the most prestigious technology awards from its industry peers, including Computer Reseller News, Microscope and IT Europa. Here Harris shares the secrets of his success with Alison Dewar
Now 46, Harris grew up in Chalfont St Peter and attended Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, in Amersham, where his grand idea of becoming a doctor was thwarted after he realised it would mean another eight or nine years of study. Instead, armed with A Levels in maths, biology and chemistry, he decided to capitalise on the skills acquired courtesy of the school’s mini “business club” and join the world of work. Already gifted with a healthy dose of entrepreneurial spirit he knew straightaway that sales would be his chosen field and during a successful career went on to work for industry giants including Motorola and Nokia before founding his own business. Married with three daughters aged four, seven and 15, he lives in Wokingham and enjoys football and cricket in his spare time.
back to the same recruitment agent. I was very naïve, but he said if he was me, he would go into computers because that’s where the “big money” would be. I didn’t know anything about computers, but I knew I could sell and I ended up selling training courses to a B2B audience. It was the ‘school of hard knocks’ type of selling – I was literally given a Yellow Pages and a phone and told to get on with it. The first six months was as hard as it would ever get and it required plenty of determination, a thick skin, energy and persistence. I loved it. It was always a challenge to turn a “no” into a “yes” and even today I’ll still make a cold call if I have to because I’ve been there and done it before. Eventually I was their most successful salesman and became a team leader.
Tell us about your first job
When I left school, the teachers said I would be an abject failure because I wasn’t going to university, but I knew I would get a job as a salesperson – I just didn’t know what I would be doing. I knew I needed to dress for the part though, so I went and bought a suit and took a train to London. I knew there were some recruitment agencies in Baker Street, so I knocked on every door until one of them got me a job. This job was working for a creative advertising agency, selling its screenprint services to other agencies and luckily for me, our team was the best in the business, so I really landed on my feet. That job taught me about differentiation, about doing things really well and creating trust and relationships – those lessons have stayed with me throughout my career.
When did you make the move into IT? I left when the agency was taken over and I went
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From there, I went out onto the road, working for IT resellers and it was then that the PC market really started to explode. IBM and Compaq were the dominant players and suddenly it was all about mainframes, moving from standalone PCs, networking with LANS and WANS, and IT security started to become an issue.
Funnily enough, with the advent of mobile devices it’s now come full circle because we’re back to having central data centres but this time it’s via the cloud.
What was the prompt for launching Cloud Distribution?
I went on to work for Motorola and Nokia, where I gained experience in all areas of channel reselling and became passionate about that as a route to market. I closed bigger deals, became more focused on what I was selling and while I was working for Nokia, I had greater exposure to the world of IT security and networking.
By 2009, I was at the point where I had had enough of the big corporate world, so I took voluntary redundancy and planned to do nothing for a while
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – DECEMBER14/JANUARY15
except watch Australia, who were over for the summer playing cricket.
I had known Scott for a number of years and when he approached me and said he had sold his business and was thinking of starting a new one, I thought it was worth a conversation in the pub. From there, Cloud Distribution was born. Scott came from a VOIP background and I came from networking and security, so we each brought different skills to the company.
How easy was it to get started?
The tough part was finding the right vendors to go to market with. We wanted to carve out a niche for ourselves as a distributor that was a bit of a ‘talent spotter’ when it came to finding new, disruptive and innovative technologies.
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