Heron IT Wins National Award!
We are very proud to announce that we have earned a Britain’s 50 Best Managed IT Companies Award by e-Channel News, an international IT news channel. This is a true testament to the hard work everyone has put in over the years. We have interviewed the founder and managing director, Colin Hammond, to find out his thoughts behind the success – read the full interview below.
Colin, what was in your mind when you setup Heron IT?
When I setup Heron IT in 2009 I wanted to work to high standards in everything that we do, from advising on the correct and best equipment, professional installations, top technical support and above all, being friendly and approachable. To do that we had to get the organisation of the company right and this award has made me feel proud that we have achieved that.
Can you share with us the journey of the company over the last 15 years? What were the key milestones and challenges that have shaped its growth and success?
Yes, the company was formed in June 2009 after I left my previous job at Ipswich Town Football Club where I was Head of IT for ten years. I had gained a lot of experience in IT in the role, and I wanted to take this experience and use it to set up my own business. I set up the company with a view to seeing how it would perform for six months and I’m pleased to say that we managed to get over that threshold and move on. In the first year we were doing a lot of consultancy work coupled with some IT support and after a year we took on our first technician who helped to increase our IT support work and capability. Over the years the company grew gradually, taking on another technician and then we took on Sarah Black who could sell hardware for us, making us a Value Added Reseller; that gave us another arm to the business so at this point we had consultancy, support and hardware sales in our offer. This gave us more or less a “one stop shop” for clients which made it easy for clients to come to us. My aim was always to give a good, reliable and honest service and to build the business on that basis. As time went by we took on more staff and now we have 4 technical staff, a Finance Officer and a Marketing Assistant.
What does winning the ‘Britain’s Best 50 Managed IT Companies’ award mean to the company and to you personally?
For the company it shows that we have structured the company in a way that covers a lot of the professional requirements of running a business. It covered many aspects of what we do, and I’m pleased to say that we obviously scored highly in many of the areas which enabled us to win the award. For me personally, as I said before it was my aim to set up a professional, honest company that was well managed and I sort of always had the feeling that we’d achieved that by the fact that we were able to bring on new clients and more importantly keep them and keep them happy. Having won this award is objective proof that we’ve achieved that.
Could you speak about the role of your team in securing this accolade? How do you foster talent and teamwork within the company?
The team has been absolutely essential in securing the accolade as it would have been impossible without them. All our staff are really conscientious and they all want to improve themselves with their knowledge and do the best that they possibly can for our clients. They often go the extra mile. How do we foster that talent? Well we give them freedom to make their own decisions and sometimes their own mistakes, and we also try to give them time and facilities for training. We’re also trying to make our staff collaborate together and work as a team, because we can see, just like any team, it works much better if everybody is working together rather than individually.
How do you foresee this award impacting your company’s operations, client relations, and market position?
It’s difficult to see how it will impact our companies’ operations and client relations because we already feel that we’re trying really hard in those respects in terms of market position. But it proves to people who don’t necessarily know us or you’re not quite sure about us that we are a standout local company and indeed in the London market as well; there are very few other companies in those geographical areas that have won this award so we’re proud of that and we want to shout about it.
With this award now part of your company’s legacy, what are the future goals and directions for the company? How do you plan to continue this level of excellence?
We would love to bring our level of service to as many clients as possible future goals and directions way trying to expand into London. We already have some clients that we work with in London and we saw that we could improve the lives of many other London-based organisations and part of that is to increase our purchasing capability and we’re just in the process of taking on a purchasing assistant who can help us to improve our capability in that respect they will continue to try to involve everybody in the company the best we can and continue training and career development.
What advice would you give to emerging IT companies who aspire to achieve similar recognition?
That’s a good question. I think there’s a couple of things really. First of all, make sure that you’ve got your own personal core values clear in your mind so for us that seems like honesty integrity and keeping people happy. Then following on from that you must be persistent, you have to jump out of your comfort zone continually and you have to keep learning and adapting to change. If you don’t jump out of your comfort zone, or you don’t adapt to change, you won’t make any progress.
What message would you like to share with your current and potential customers following this prestigious recognition?
To thank them very much for allowing us to work in a way that has helped us to win this award. For our potential clients please look at what we’ve done and you can see that we’re trusted by many clients and you can also trust us going forward.
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