Paul Evans is the founder Mindera, a leading global software engineering company based in the UK. Mindera operates without job titles or hierarchy, allowing people to take on projects in different parts of the business. The company, which has revenues of £85 million, has offices in London, Leicester, Portugal, San Francisco and India, with clients including Selfridges, Trainline and New Look.
I had a bad stutter as a child and always felt it was important for everyone to be treated equally. At Mindera, everyone gets the same bonus no matter where they are, no one has their own office and everyone is a shareholder.
This all reminds me of my first boss, Sandra Barrie. I did a computer science BTEC but decided when I was 18 that I wasn’t ready for a degree. I joined the civil service in 1988, wanting to be a software developer, but at that time it was necessary to have a diploma to write code. So I started working in the finance department at Plymouth.
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One day, the coach asked me to make a simple Word spreadsheet. These were the days when offices had a big computer in the corner that no one used. My job was to prepare letters for the team and run errands during the day, but Sandra, a senior manager, saw what I could do and offered me a job in technology.
He had to break down every barrier at the top of the civil service to give me this opportunity. I get emotional thinking about this now because I wouldn’t be where I am today if he hadn’t stuck his neck out for me. I stayed in public service for eight years and left as a principal software engineer.
Sandra cared and wanted to help. A stable, healthy and happy environment like the one he creates creates more productive people. And this wasn’t about watching the clock, which is weird in public service.
Sandra had a huge impact on the way I work today. There are no clocks at Mindera, because people should invest in the results of the work rather than how much time they spend on it.
Because of my stuttering, Sandra supported me in group meetings. I would have interesting points to say and he would help me convey them. It’s easy to pay more attention to people who talk more or stand out in a group, and so today I’m always looking for people who are quieter and perhaps deserve more.
Later in 2014, when I found out I was leaving Betfair Group, I remember telling my wife that I didn’t want to go back to corporate work and compete with the big players.
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I knew I had the ability to strike out on my own and 10 years after launching we now have a successful private equity (PE) backed company in Australia. Most PEs would ask me to do six months of due diligence and estimate the amount of business we could win. But I said Australia was the right place for us and that’s what we did. We were not afraid of the unknown and dealt with problems as they arose.
We start by understanding what our customer wants to do. I spend most of my time meeting people but I don’t focus on selling to them, I just try to understand what they want to do and how we can help them do it. Our revenue will be £85 million and this is entirely driven by our relationships with our customers.
I travel to our offices around the world because I want to be available. I also communicate with the 1,200 staff in the group four times a week.
I always share because I want people to know what we’re going to do next, what I’m thinking, and what fears I have because this is a challenging time in the industry. This again harkens back to my time in public service where people were able to say what they thought.
The reason I don’t like job titles is because people come in and say, ‘I’m the COO, I must be something.’ I have no doubt that people need to have a great career to achieve this. But I want people to be seen for the work they do, not for the status they have, and that’s very important.
An engineer in India might have an old desktop machine costing £250, while a colleague in Portugal might have a beautiful silver Mac. I wanted everyone to have the same thing, and so I would also look at our spending to make sure we were spending the same amount of money on the same quality of food everywhere.
This has nothing to do with the fact that we are a self-organized structure rather than a regular company, it’s more that I want everyone to feel good and no one to feel like a second-class citizen.
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I never thought about the way I viewed the world until I was in my mid-forties and realized what Sandra had done early in my career. Today, we have a program where we educate children on the autistic spectrum aged 12 and up. I realize life can be a struggle for them and I want to give them opportunities.
Sandra’s husband at the time was also my boss in the civil service at one point. At a high-level meeting, someone asked if I could become a director one day and said ‘no’ because my stuttering was so bad.
But Sandra saw it firsthand, she saw me as a person and who I could be. I think he would be incredibly proud of where I am today.
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