Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  Perhaps as a result, the company thrived. There were still plenty of potential clients who refused to take us seriously because we were women, but for others it was, if not a positive selling-point, at least a reason for not forgetting us. Our client-base grew slowly but surely. We got a job working for Tate & Lyle, helping to optimise the scheduling of the lorries that carried their sugar around the UK. (Decades later, I still feel a stab of panic if I see a Tate & Lyle lorry on a country road, in case it is lost.)

  Our PERT project for Selection Trust led on to a series of other PERT projects, some of which were quite substantial. We were hired by Mars, the confectionery company, to improve the efficiency of their production processes. Their UK base was in Slough, which I used to visit by bus. I remember agonising about the ethics of accepting the goody-bags full of chocolate bars that they always used to press upon me when I left. (This issue arose with Tate & Lyle too. Each of us who worked on the project was given a 6lb tin of their famous black treacle. I have only just finished mine.) And so it went on. Imperceptibly, and unintentionally, we were becoming much more than freelance programmers. We were becoming experts in logistics and operational research.

  British Railways was another big early customer. They commissioned a major study of their nationwide freight scheduling, This required me to make several journeys to Doncaster, by train. They always provided me with a first class rail warrant, which eased the strain considerably. It also encouraged me to feel that I was a serious businesswoman.

  There was, however, a drawback. I still hadn’t the slightest idea how to run a business. I understood software, and I knew how to work - hard, and in an organised manner. But I hadn’t a clue about how to run a company. Even the basics of administration - how to register, how to make contracts of employment - involved a steep learning curve, while more subtle skills, such as managing cash-flow, eluded me completely. I didn’t even know that the issues existed, let alone that I needed to master them.

  As our workload expanded, this became a serious problem. We were being paid to do more and bigger projects, and each project was in itself profitable, yet we never seemed to have enough money in the bank. Sensing that something was wrong, I decided to invest in some expert advice, and asked the consultants of Urwick Debold (by now a satisfied customer) if they could help. They sent out Kit Grindley, the manager who had liaised with me on the standards-writing project.

  He came over for a morning - or more than a morning, as it turned out, although he only charged me for half the day, which was all I could afford. (They charged a terrifying £150 a day.) He looked through what passed for my books and was simultaneously impressed and horrified. I was, he explained, on the point of having to close the business down: there simply wasn’t enough cash to pay the freelancers at the end of the month. This seemed mad to me: we had far more money coming in than going out. But the incoming money hadn’t come in yet, and wasn’t coming in quickly enough.

  But Kit - who later became an influential professor and IT consultant - could also see that the business itself was fundamentally sound. The organisations that owed us money, or with whom we had signed contracts for future work, could in no way be described as credit risks. (Other early clients included Rolls-Royce and GEC.) There was clearly a market for what we did, and our long-term future looked astonishingly bright. So he got out his chequebook and, there and then, wrote out a personal cheque for £500 to tide us through. It was an act of generosity that I have never forgotten, and also an example, which continues to inspire me, of the power of intelligent lending. We paid him back rapidly, as I’m sure he never doubted we would; and that cottage industry that he saved went on to become a multinational giant. But without that timely loan, all of our potential and inherent strengths would have come to nothing.

  8: Growing Pains

  AFTER THIS, I made a serious effort to educate myself in business matters. But none of the books I found seemed to take much interest in the kind of business I was running. They focused on things like production and logistics and theories of manufacturing efficiency. The idea of a service industry - which is what we were - barely existed in those days. I also considered doing an MBA, and got as far as making inquiries at Harvard before concluding that the disruption to our family life would be too great.

  Then I met a local academic, Jack Bungard, who lectured in business studies at Watford College (later the West Herts Management Centre), and an idea occurred to me. Surely, I suggested to him, a theorist of business must need real-life raw material from which to draw his conclusions? So why didn’t he come in and treat my business as a case study - free of charge? He did, and the arrangement worked well for both of us. In the course of an attachment lasting many months, he got a front-row view of the birth pangs of a very modern kind of company. I got the benefit of a high-powered consultant with years of top-level experience of how companies usually work. He taught me many things, the most important of which - based on sitting in on various unsuccessful pitches - was how to sell. He taught me to rein back my instinctive desire to show off my insight and technical expertise and, instead, to listen. If clients expressed doubts about my proposals, he explained, it was no good my simply telling them they were wrong. I needed to respond to their worries: to take on board what they were saying and modify my proposal to fit their needs.

  I listened. I learnt. I became better at selling and better at running the company - and the work began to pour in. Following Kit Grindley’s advice, I began to link payments to programmers to the jobs they had worked on: when the client paid, we paid. (He called this “gearing”.) This felt a little mean at first - although we did offer the safety-net that if the client hadn’t paid within three months we would pay anyway. But it did do away at a stroke with 90 per cent of our cashflow problems - and, as a result, with the risk that we would suddenly go out of business.

  Our lack of financial muscle was, on the whole, an advantage. We had access to a small bank overdraft, thanks to Derek’s secure salary and an old-style bank manager called Mr Priddle, but there were next to no fixed assets. So we grew only when our market grew. I hired people only as I needed them, to work from home on specific projects. Many of them became regulars, but only on the basis that the relationship was a mutually satisfactory one. Some didn’t want to work all the time - usually because of family commitments - but liked being on our books because of the interesting and rewarding work it provided when they were available. (There wasn’t much other interesting part-time work that a woman could do in those days.) Even our project managers - essential for the growing number of larger projects, on which several programmers worked simultaneously - were hired on an ad hoc basis, working from home at whatever times worked best for them. We didn’t call it flexi-working, because the term didn’t exist, but in due course that concept was to become one of our defining characteristics.

  In fact, there were some people who preferred to work away from home, which meant that, after a while, Moss Cottage became very crowded. There were three of us working there on a regular basis, plus Barbara on Wednesday afternoons, plus her baby, plus mine. We usually had two people working in the lounge, with a third in the spare bedroom. There were boxes of files piled high on the piano, and Derek had to make a special collapsible table for the spare bedroom - we had to take it down whenever we wanted to open the cupboard. The photocopier occupied most of the bathroom. In fact, it was a man who had come to service the photocopier who first put the idea into my head that we should get a proper office. He had just been doing a job for a company in Chesham, in Station Road, which was vacating its premises, and he thought they would suit us perfectly. I decided to look into it.

  Moss Cottage, named after the moss rose in the garden, had originally been a pair of agricultural cottages; the large window dated from when it served as the village shop.

  But it was hard to find the time. The need for new clients meant that I had to respond to
every enquiry. Most of my meetings took place on Tuesday afternoons, which was the only time I had a babysitter. I funnelled as many appointments as possible into those few hours each week, knowing that - since Derek came home at 6pm - I could remain in London (or wherever the client was based) for as long as it took. But then, since most of these meetings yielded requests for more detailed proposals, there were countless hours to be found, somewhere in the week, for preparing reports about what we could and couldn’t do for different prospective clients. And, of course, I had to make sure that our existing projects were progressing satisfactorily - which could mean anything from ringing people up for reports to putting more coal on the Moss Cottage fire to keep everyone warm.

  It all seemed to work quite well, and new work kept coming in. But it all felt alarmingly happy-go-lucky, even by my naïve standards. I remember us having earnest debates about how to spell “computer” and how many ‘m’s there should be in “program”. Luckily, our clients never got to hear about this.

  But one thing that did become screamingly evident as we expanded was the need for quality control. One project, involving Castrol (part of Mobil Oil), nearly ended in disaster. I hired a very high-powered programmer to do it: an Indian lady who came from Dublin University. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, except that the project was taking much longer than anticipated. Then the client began to query the amount of time that the programmer had been spending on their computer. I looked into it, and found that although the programmer in question was, unquestionably, a brilliant woman, her brilliance did not extend to being able to carry out a clearly defined task in a coherent way. Her work was totally undocumented and she didn’t seem able to explain where she had got to or why. She may or may not have known what she was doing, but she appeared to have been heading off down a series of blind alleys that made sense only to herself, and I realised that I could not afford to employ her any more.

  I had to drop everything, learn a computer language (FORTRAN) that I had never used before, and work round the clock for two weeks trying to unpick the mess she had made. Amazingly, I succeeded - largely because Derek was able to take two weeks’ leave from Dollis Hill and look after Giles. But by the end of it, after nearly a fortnight of 18-hour days, I was close to collapse. The project was rescued, however, and we retained our crucial record of having nothing but satisfied customers. Kit Grindley later told me that it was at this point that he knew that Freelance Programmers would succeed. I, meanwhile, was beginning to wonder if starting my own company had been such a good idea after all.

  One beneficial effect of the Castrol debacle was that it forced us to become more professional in our approach to quality control. We were already relatively advanced in this respect, thanks to the objective standards that I had created for Urwick Debold, which we also applied to our own work. But only now did we develop a really rigorous system of process control. Every project was divided into phases, and at the end of each phase we would double and treble check before we moved on to the next phase. No one else in the industry could claim to have anything like such a robust system, and it stood us in good stead: not just because we developed a reputation for reliability, but because the system allowed us to be much more precise in our planning. While others were still saying “There are just a few more bugs to be ironed out”, we could say “The job is now 60 per cent done and will be finished in another 10 days.”. This precision also allowed us to offer fixed prices on our contracts, which was attractive both to clients and to us.

  In the short-term, however, I had taken home a more negative lesson from the Castrol episode. Running a company was a headache. Even after two short years, I was beginning to encounter the familiar paradox that at one stage or another demotivates most people who start their own businesses: I had begun to delegate much of what I loved about the business - writing software and designing systems - while filling my time with all sorts of administrative, financial, legal and managerial chores for which I felt next to no enthusiasm. Instead of welcoming each new project as an exciting new challenge, I was starting to see new assignments as potential disasters waiting to happen - and the bigger the contracts grew, the greater the potential for disaster.

  I still retained most of my enthusiasm, but I was sufficiently jaded with the management side of things to feel a huge surge of relief when, towards the end of 1964, one of our clients, a company called Business Operations Research (BOR), announced that they wanted to buy us. It seemed too good to be true. They would put up the money, but I would retain day-to-day control. They would pay me a salary - something I hadn’t had since the company started. And they would provide investment capital, and pay for offices and other support. All the administrative responsibilities that had been weighing me down would be taken off my hands, and I would be free to return to doing the work I loved.

  If it had worked out, I would never have become rich. But becoming rich had never been one of my aims. All I wanted was the freedom to do what I was good at: that is, to explore the potential of information technology for transforming the way people worked. I had never dreamed of fast cars and huge houses. Rather, my ideal was to be part of some kind of high-powered creative commune, full of free, kindred spirits, held together not by rules and conventions but by our shared joy in what we did. It was the business itself, not its potential for generating profits, that I cared about.

  The proposed takeover was thus a highly attractive proposition. It took a long time to sort out the details, but, in the meantime, I went out and, on the strength of the provisional agreement, rented the vacant offices that the photocopier repair man had recommended, at 16 Station Road, Chesham. I hired three full-time employees, and, since they all had young children, took steps to ensure that the office incorporated a crèche.

  Then something odd happened. I mentioned to our would-be purchasers that I was going to register the crèche through the proper channels. “Oh no,” said Don Neville, the man at BOR I was dealing with, “you don’t want to do that.” But, I insisted, we must do things properly. “No, no,” he insisted. “You mustn’t. That sort of thing’s a waste of time and money.” And I realised that, as my owner-to-be, in control of the future purse-strings, he was in effect giving me an order - and was telling me to do something that seemed to me to be wrong.

  Suddenly the proposed takeover appeared in a different light. Selling the company, I realised, wouldn’t just mean offloading the various administrative and financial chores that I found so tiresome. It would also mean relinquishing the very independence that had prompted me to start the company in the first place.

  I told them that the deal was off.

  Any satisfaction I felt in having taken a stand on a point of principle evaporated when I considered what a mess I was now in. I had commitments to three employees, a commitment to rent our new office, contracts with numerous clients - and, suddenly, no money to pay for anything. It was a critical point in the company’s history. Did we give up? Did we - or I - scale back, or renege on the commitments I had just made? Or did we find the money from somewhere else?

  We lived in this impractical but idyllic home for 8 years.

  I agonised with Derek for several days. The first two alternatives seemed sensible but unacceptable. I had been trying, in some vague way, to run the business honourably and decently. It would have broken my heart to have let my little workforce down. And it would have broken my heart, too, to have abandoned a business that had so much going for it and that seemed so close to turning my vision into a reality.

  At the last possible moment, we made our decision. We would make it work. We re-mortgaged the house - for £1,600 - and, in effect, funded the expansion ourselves.

  This was frightening stuff. If things went wrong now, we faced something close to ruin; we would, at best, have been back in a bedsit. But this very scariness was, I think, crucial to our subsequent success. When everything you possess is on the li
ne, you tend to find reserves of drive and commitment that you didn’t know you had when you were less exposed.

  Steadily, we made things work, although it seemed sometimes to be as much by luck as by judgement. There’s a sense of inevitability to the growth in our revenues when you look back at the figures today: £7,000 in 1964-5, £17,000 in 1965-6, £35,000 in 1966-7. But that’s not how it felt at the time. We were an almost ludicrously minimalist organisation, with three managers and a secretary operating from our bare offices above the opticians while I flitted about between Moss Cottage, the office and the headquarters of various clients and potential clients. There were also many local freelancers who were so closely involved as to be to all intents and purposes part of the business. An example that springs to mind is Pam Elderkin, a high-powered technical person who lived just down the road in Chalfont. When I had drafted the main outlines of a proposal for a project, I would pass it on to her to assess its technical implications. I rarely got a chance to work on proposals without interruption until the evening, and so I tended to drop my drafts through her letter-box in the small hours of the morning. She could then start on them the moment her husband left for work, and would have finished them, returned them and cleared away all traces of her work before her husband returned in the evening. I presume that he knew that she worked - but I don’t think her neighbours did.