How I balance running a business with writing novels

Christopher Ride has not only managed to run a fast-growing business in the IT sector – Interactive – tripling the company’s size in the last five years, but has juggled that immense task with writing two novels published by Random House.

Ride, who recently won an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, says time management is critical to making sure he can balance his fast-growing IT services business with his writing commitments – and says more business owners need to learn how to write well.

Can you describe your history at Interactive?

I joined when Interactive was already two-years-old. They had 10 people that had worked there, and it was a real niche business. IBM used to encourage its customers to upgrade to new gear by removing support on the old gear. Genius.

But one of our first engineers was asked by a customer if we could look after a piece of computer hardware for them. One contract turned into 10, and that into 100, and that was in the days of the big tin IT systems.

We started looking over individual systems and signing annual revenue contracts. We don’t sell products, just services, and services on a contract basis.

So when did you join?

I joined in 1992. It was a small company, a niche market. I started as a sales guy, and used to be a techie over at IBM. I knew the products, and wanted to move into sales. Obviously what’s happened at the company has exceeded my wildest expectations.

I never thought we would become as big a company such as IBM, which has expanded to thousands of people and loses a little bit of that focus on culture. And that’s not having a go at them – they’re a huge company with thousands of people.

We wanted to leave behind the things we didn’t like, take what we did, and ever since then the service has expanded.

How big is the business in terms of sales?

We’ve tripled over the past five years. We’ve gone from $30 million to $100 million, and projecting we’ll grow 23% this year.

If anything, we’re holding the growth back, because there are just more opportunities from good suppliers than there are vendors right now.

Why are you trying to hold onto that growth?

We don’t want to risk growing any faster, because all your new staff outnumber the old. Right now, the staff that have been here less than two years outnumber those that have. You need to have a comprehensive plan to make sure they can be inducted into the culture of your organisation which is all about service, excellence, and so on. If your culture isn’t right, then you’re doomed.

There’s been a lot of investment in this space lately, such as with NextDC. How does that affect your position in the market?

I think each of these competitors doesn’t really bullseye our service proposition. They’re off to the side in different places, building data centres, and some have service companies, but not across the same customer patch.

We see ourselves as an SME market provider, where a company doesn’t have a lot of IT skills, they come looking for someone they can trust. They need to trust that provider with their security and their data.

You mentioned before the culture changes as the company grows. How do you keep an emphasis on culture in Interactive?

Fifteen years ago, I went to a large consultancy firm and said I needed them to study our business, customers and give us a report on what it is that we were doing well. I paid $25,000 for it, which was a huge amount of money. The consultant was PwC.

It found the reason we were successful was the quality of our relationships with clients. Everyone can have spare parts, data processes and so on. But it comes down to the quality of your relationships.

So the reason we drive culture so hard is that it needs to be embedded deep within the organisation to foster those relationships. There is no point going into an organisation 10 years later and saying you’ll introduce a culture. It has to be engrained on the psyche of every single person that works there.

We value culture above all other initiatives, including profit, technical systems and so on. Those are by-products of culture.

Could you describe the culture at your business?

I’m very conscious of the fact you’re going to spend more time at work than with the people you love. I want to work in a place where I like the people, and we have the same objectives. So every day I have to believe that it’s going to be great going to work.

Your business is growing at a fast rate in an industry that’s enjoying a lot of growth as well. Why would you want to take on such a large personal challenge such as writing a book?

I attended 13 different schools on six continents. So I saw a lot of different things, experienced quite a lot of different cultures. I saw a couple of military coups, and sat next to Michael Dell in computer science class.

When you do that and change your life a lot, you don’t have a great social network. So I became very inwardly focused, and so I would just write. It was a hobby of mine, and I eventually worked on a book for 10 years. I tried to get it published, couldn’t, and then did a small self-published run.

I got picked up by Random House and signed a three book deal. I really just wrote as a sense of necessity.

Does it get hard to switch between the two responsibilities?

It’s not hard work for me. Some people go home, and watch television. I go home and sit at my computer. If I’m not travelling for work, I write every night.

You write late at night, don’t you?

From 10pm-2am. Generally I’m writing most nights. They’re just completely different disciplines for me. I think I have extremely good time management skills, but it becomes a lot easier if you love what you’re doing.

When people talk about time management, it becomes about balancing the things you don’t love doing against the things you do. But I just train myself to worker harder at it.

How do you practically deal with running a business and writing? How do you manage your time?

If you have the childhood that I had, you have the capability to lead a compartmentalised mind. And so you’re able to focus and be in the moment, and that’s a very powerful thing. I can’t go from work to writing without having a nap first.

I lie down, set my alarm for 20 minutes, and that’s because you start getting sleep inertia. You set getting into REM sleep. You want to sleep enough so your mind shuts down once, and then activates. Any longer and it starts shutting down.

Writers tend to look over everything they’ve done and constantly rewrite. Do you do that in your business life too?

The short answer is no. But one of the good advantages about being a writer in business is that a lot of what we both do goes out to the customer. The better you write, the more concise you can be, and the more you can simply put the customer value proposition.

It’s a skill that isn’t used enough in the business community, I think. Being a really good writer is critical.

Go to any website, and you’ll get a view as to how the organisation values the quality of writing. Really good businesses make sure they hire writer to show that’s spot on, as it’s the window to the company. It’s a great skill to have.