TechTime is growing and our latest addition to the team is Rodger Perkins as the Chief Operating Officer (COO). Along with handling business operations, Rodger will be out and about engaging with our customers. With more than 20 years of leadership experience, we're excited to have him join us. Rodger believes that leadership is not about being in charge, but taking care of those in your charge.
Rodger enjoys being a creator of awesome customer outcomes and experiences. He is known to lead through active participation and enjoys working with great people. With a deep background in banking, finance and government, he's been working in various IT roles for longer than he can remember. He believes in doing the right thing with a focus on team members and customers. For him, people always come first. Apart from working in New Zealand, he has also worked in England and Germany. After 10 years with one employer, Rodger was looking for a new challenge. His professional history is filled with various aspects of business development, organisational leadership and management. He looked for an opportunity that brought these various aspects together into one new role that led to this awesome COO position at TechTime.
Rodger is proud of developing a new business unit within DIA, then again for Assurity. He quickly realised that being able to make a real difference was important to him. TechTime presented an ideal opportunity. Rodger has a very broad range of experience, and he believes that his past work experiences prepared him well for this new position at TechTime. On asking him about his personal goals, he said, 'The reason I rush into work each morning - I'm here to make a real and positive impact to every aspect of the TechTime business.'
With the wealth of experience, Rodger has, he says, 'I think the most important aspect of any role is the people that you're working with each day and the relationships developed through this shared connection.'
He believes technology is a vital component in the success of every business in NZ. With the recent lockdown due to Covid-19 proved this. Businesses with solid cloud strategies and existing online presence coped better than most and business with the ability to work with remote staff also came through this pandemic period intact.
His experience led him to make these three observations:
- Change is the only constant- There will be continuous and rapid changes in our environment. This pace of change creates pressure, especially on people and relationships. Our customers are constantly evolving and relationships shifting as people change. How we deal with change is vital, maintaining focus on the people we are interacting with and being mindful of the journey - making it an infinite journey.
- Competition is now global - We compete locally for our customers business, but increasingly we will compete on a global level with organisations able to secure services and outcomes from anyway. This also provides the opportunity for NZ business to sell globally and here at TechTime we are already doing this with our Atlasssian Marketplace add-ons. A small business based in Petone is creating global sales.
- Partnerships are essential - We (individually or as a business) can't continue to do everything needed on our own. We need partnerships for support and to enable growth. Partnerships enable increased opportunity and presence. Working together within partnerships create better outcomes, especially for customers and growth for all involved. Partnerships require great relationships (circle back to people).
In his opinion, TechTime needs to continue to drive change, push for more resilience, build strong technology-based outcomes based on excellent customer experiences. TechTime through its relationship with Atlassian has the ability to support every business in NZ on this journey. We are poised to be leaders as we enable change. His plan for TechTime is simple - it needs to be a great place for the team. This means it is a place where the team thrives within a creative and supportive environment. It's always about the people and he'd like to see TechTime being a destination employment location. He wants to achieve this via active social media campaigns, creating great results, being a community leader and taking time to celebrate. Ultimately though, his role is to implement the founder's vision.
He would like to implement reporting and visibility of what the team is doing. Basically though, he wants to focus on three key areas of the business;
- People - What does retention look like, why do people work for TechTime, why do people leave, establishing satisfaction measurement, career/personal development, mentoring and coaching programmes.
- Sales - What is our sales pipeline, weighted sales pipeline. Measurement of Cost of Sale. Regular and visible sales discussions and activity. Also, as we review the accounts, we will identify opportunities for cross and up-selling.
- Account Management - Establishment of an understanding of our key accounts and the development of Simple Account Strategies. Targeted account development and growth. An outcome, for our customers, is to link our work through to their success. How does TechTime help its customers to be successful and then the development of customer case studies and recommendations?
Rodger wants to enjoy coming to work and make sure the whole team looks forward to the same. With initiatives like kebab on Fridays and social activities, he wants to encourage team building, togetherness and shared success. Finally, on a more personal note, he enjoys travelling, taking risks and gets his thrills through trail running, especially at night - so far, he hasn't been too lost (although the police were called in once!).
A message to our customers:
"Now is the time to be a truly customer-centric organisation. I believe that 'Customers Are Really Everything' (we will implement a CARE programme) and we are here to enable our customers to create amazing outcomes. I look forward to understanding the businesses of our customers and bringing all the skills and experience that TechTime has to help our customers on their journey - working with TechTime will in itself be an incredible experience. We will create case studies with our customers and look forward to receiving their recommendations. We will be actively asking our customers to support TechTime through participation in both customer experience panels and product development panels. TechTime wants to know what is working and what needs to be better.
TechTime has customers spread across the globe working on every continent and within a vast range of industry sectors, this means we have the ability to understand many different business models, economic scenarios and cultural requirements. We will capture this information, develop it and represent our learning back to our customer community. I believe that sharing this knowledge and understanding is particularly important in today's uncertain times.
Finally, this is a journey of continuous improvement and we look forward to taking each step with our customers."
A very warm welcome to you Rodger on the behalf of TechTime team and customers!