Clekt has just surpassed five years in business from our inception in 2020. The experience of being trusted to lead the construction of the Company from the ground up has been incredible and the purpose of this summary / memoire is to try to put that experience into words.
By way of some background, the idea for Clekt’s original form was conceived on a boat in Bristol Harbour on a November day in 2019; the “fab four” behind the idea were Alan, Andy, Claudia and Ian. At that time, I had left a well-paid corporate career of (near enough) two decades within which time I had risen to the dizzy heights of Technology & Data Director for a global fashion retail brand. Whilst my career had reached a level where it was financially very nicely rewarding, it wasn’t fulfilling because it was all consuming and didn’t leave enough time for my family or for me. And so, the Clekt journey set sail.
Clekt began life with big opportunities ahead, but the odds were stacked against immediate term success. The failure rates attached to start-ups were a given however the probability of failure was compounded because Clekt began operating for the first time one week after the UK Prime Minister at the time announced that the Nation would be entering its first lockdown due to the Global Pandemic.
The odds really were stacked against us.
Our first vision and value proposition were to create a SaaS product which fused together what we all know as middleware with a data warehouse environment. The vision for the market was that Clekt’s customers would subscribe to our product, which we called The Enterprise Data Hub, because it would become a rich central repository of data that would combine datasets together by capturing flows of operational data between systems and make it available for analytical purposes. The Commercial premise was sound – businesses (certainly the ones I had worked in) were spending an inordinate amount of money on data warehouses, separate middleware systems and reporting tools, fact. The emergence of on demand cloud systems was making barriers to enter into the middleware and data warehousing space much lower and data as a Board Table subject was gaining traction.
We had some early successes of selling the EDH dream, however, amongst many others, we learned three fundamental lessons during that phase of Clekt:
“Lessons learned” is a phrase used all too often in business, particularly in large corporate organisations. In roles gone by and prior to Clekt, I would have used the term lessons learned when I was referring to a systems outage that ultimately, I was responsible for – perhaps a distribution centre had lost its connectivity to a courier system meaning that packing labels couldn’t be printed. The lesson learned might have been that my team hadn’t realised that an upgrade on an API endpoint was required to ensure continuity of the courier labelling service, and it had failed. What I have learned in Clekt is that the lesson isn’t really learned until you actually understand and feel the impact of the experience and are able to directly link that to the business consequence.
The lessons learned from the first two years in Clekt lead us in late 2022 to pivot the business model and set out a new value proposition for the market because if we hadn’t done that, in all likelihood we would have been in the 20% of all start-ups that statistically fail (I’m not sure whether that statistic has been updated post pandemic or not).
Just like lessons learned, the term “pivot” is also used frequently when describing the evolution of a start up business as it finds its feet with a value proposition that scales profitably. Whilst it didn’t necessarily feel like it at the time, the need to change our business model was obvious – we were telling our customers that the most important asset in their business (as well as their people) is their data yet we were asking those customers to entrust us with their data and we would process it inside our systems and let them have access to it – they didn’t want to do that; would they have entrusted us to manage their people too? I doubt it. In short, rightly, they wanted to be in control of their data.
What was equally becoming obvious was that businesses that had already poured millions of dollars into developing similar platforms to the underlying concepts of the Enterprise Data Hub were already winning in a big way. Snowflake had featured in certain customer engagements but the market opportunity that Snowflake presented for Clekt was becoming ever more prevalent and so, our pivot to a consultancy and services business began, with the most vocal ambassador for change being Head of Sales at the time (now our Commercial Director James Springham).
Snowflake was founded in 2012 by three data warehousing experts. The company emerged with a revolutionary vision: to create a cloud-based data platform that could separate storage from computing, allowing for unprecedented scalability and flexibility. Snowflake publicly launched its data warehouse as a service offering on AWS in 2014, introducing what they then called the “Data Cloud” – a completely new architecture designed specifically for the cloud era.
We seized the opportunity to build a strong hold in the relatively immature consultancy and services market surrounding the Snowflake platform. Over a period of the next two years during 2023 and 2024 we have evolved Clekt’s end to end value proposition and operating model to focus solely on being the go-to Snowflake consultancy and services partner of choice. During that time, we have achieved a lot:
So where are we heading?
We are entering the era of Clekt 2.0, a phase of business growth that ramps up, building on the successes of our collective achievement of the past two foundational years. The current team has assisted in laying the foundations for this next phase of growth and it is this team that has the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of the next phase of growth with respect to career development and experience as the business structure expands.
My confidence grows by the day as to what this team can achieve as we look to the future of Clekt. There is one overarching theme that has transcended the last five years as we have built Clekt together into what it is today – the power of the team.
The team dynamic takes different forms, and it is morphing constantly based on what the team needs to achieve at any given time. What continues to humble me is the way in which a team can come together to achieve more than is technically the sum of its parts.
If there is one sentence that summarises my experience of being part of Clekt, it is this: “I can and I will because I’ve got my team around me”. In essence that means that no matter what we face into, we face into it together – we plan together, we execute together, we fail together, we succeed together, we celebrate together. The adventure that is Clekt 2.0 is all the more exciting and realistic than Clekt 1.0 because we know we can and we know we will because we are one team around us all.
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