Bill Withers established a software company in Perth that now employs more than 120 staff. Blake Wilshaw reports.
Bill Withers has been named one of Western Australia’s top entrepreneurs, and he said the key to the success of his business has been its strong focus on strategy and finding the right staff that fit with company culture.
Mr Withers is managing director of acQuire Technology Solutions, which develops geoscientific information management systems (GIMS), which collate and store information for geoscientists and geologists, for the global resources, energy and environmental industries.
Since establishment, acQuire has grown to a multi-national with turnover this year forecast at $18 million.
The company’s international expansion happened organically, with the locations of a support office determined by the demand in each region.
After Perth, acQuire opened offices in Santiago, Calgary, Brisbane, Manchester, Belo Horizonte and Johannesburg.
“We would put in a support base first, and then we would build business development second,” Mr Withers said.
But with expansion came difficulties, with Mr Withers saying the challenges of running a multi-national firm from Perth were “substantial”.
“We operate in eight currencies, four languages. We would have someone working somewhere in the world 24 hours a day,” he said.
Managing the expansion and meeting its challenges was facilitated by the company’s structure.
“A major thing we did is not to set up fiefdoms, we have a ‘one company model’,” Mr Withers said.
“It means that the business process that is used in Canada is exactly the same all over the world.
“Boundaries are an artificial construct, not a real construct.”
An acQuire employee induction handout reads: “Recognise that you are joining a company made up of different cultures and ethnic backgrounds but with one integrated culture.”
Corporate culture is very important to Mr Withers, and he uses it as a tool for attracting and retaining staff.
“We’ve invested a lot into our values system and that is critical [to retaining staff],” he said.
“We’ve got a very, very tight recruitment process. If somebody doesn’t comply to our values system, they don’t make it in.”
As a result, he said, acQuire has a high retention rate.
“What I recognise is that with intellectual property, when you’re in a knowledge-based business; people are everything,” Mr Wither said.
“So, if you have a person leave with a lot of knowledge, to get people back to that level takes an extraordinary amount of time.”
Looking to the future, acQuire has recognised the need to invest in strategy development and has separated its operational decision-makers from those responsible for strategy.
“We don’t have everything perfect, we’re going to be working on this until the day I die, but the point is that the model is definitely one of our strengths,” Mr Withers said.
From a business perspective, Mr Withers said his company strives to mitigate risk associated with geoscientific information.
“We are providing business processes and technologies that increase the probability that they’re correct,” he said.
“Our objective is to give companies a very good solution so that, for example, they can be drilling in Burkina Faso and they can have French-speaking geologists using our technology so that they’re logging core at the point of capture and getting that data to Toronto where their corporate hub might be, in a timely fashion, and mitigating risk of loss and damage.”
Ernst & Young took notice and named Mr Withers’ success as its Western region Entrepreneur of the Year in the Technology & Emerging Industries category. He will go on to compete in the national program for the title of 2010 Australian Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in November.
But it wasn’t an overnight success, with many years of research and development going into the services and products acQuire offers today.
Mr Withers started his career as a geological draftsman “in the pre-computer days”.
While studying at the WA Institute of Technology (now Curtin University), he took an interest in computer science and completed his first drilling management system as a major project.
“I started to recognise the potential for computing and computer science in the exploration mining industry,” he said.
After graduating, he formed mining consulting business Metech with current Aquila Resources director Charles Bass.
In 1993, Metech changed its focus from consulting to technology and in 1996, Mr Withers started acQuire.
It wasn’t until 2000, after four years of research and development, that the company developed a “competent product”, he said.
Ten years later, the company has more than 120 employees and offices in six countries.
