What does a typical day at Vinters look like?
There isn’t a typical day here but that’s what I love about it and it’s what’s kept me so interested for the past 15 years! I’m someone who likes to learn hands-on – by dealing with new products and solving problems that we haven’t dealt with before.
We work with clients across many different sectors and each with different needs, which means we are constantly working on different types of solutions or with new technologies to solve particular problems. I’ll often be looking at our technology strategy for the forthcoming year and planning how we can bring new services to life, as well as enhancing current ones.
Are you working on anything exciting at the moment?
We are currently expanding our network with new diverse high speed links from Maidstone to London, which when set up, will allow us to connect to hyper-scale cloud environments and to other sites across the UK. This will be utilised for high availability and disaster recovery services. To me it’s very exciting, but to others perhaps not so much! We’re able to enhance and deliver our services to clients so they can focus on what they do best with the upmost trust in technology and products they’re using.
We are also working to expand our second generation cloud product Savanna with significant investment in our existing setup in the UK but then also launching it across our other sites in Europe and the US.
If you had one piece of business advice what would it be?
My best advice would be to learn to recognise when you are in an unproductive mindset so that you can snap out of it and focus on what matters. Many times over the years, I’ve wallowed in self-pity over a problem that has presented itself and felt like I wanted to give up. I’m sure this is a common theme for business owners, but the sooner you start to recognise that mindset you will understand that it won’t change anything. What does change the situation is taking a breather and coming up with a new strategy to tackle the problem.
What do you hope to achieve in 2021?
We’re still very mindful that the Covid-19 recovery is only just getting started, however digital transformation has been huge over the last year and we don’t see it stopping. We already have plans to expand our offices and number of staff both in the UK and US to deal with this increased demand.
For me, my role is very much changing to focus on what I label the 3 P’s – People, Partners and Product. I will focus on our own people and how to help them develop; on our partners who help us achieve success; and finally on how to create new products and services. The latter perhaps isn’t the role of a CEO however it’s what I enjoy doing and allows me to keep my skills up to date. I think it’s always important to keep some of the smaller aspects that you enjoy in your role rather than focusing on your title and job description.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this interview and if you’d like to connect with Matt on LinkedIn, you can do so here.