Feature interview: STUART LEES, ZERO DOWN
Always on the UP side
The Business Channel’s Aidan Bennett talks to Stuart Lees of IT Support Company Zero Down.
The refreshing thing about interviewing high achieving business people is that they are extremely organised. My visit to see Stuart
Lees, the energetic owner and Chief Executive of Zero Down at his William Pickering Drive base in Albany, was therefore not too demanding. He had actually prepared notes for me to make my job easier, obviously to ensure that I got the ‘Zero Down story’ just right.
I could tell from the outset, that Stuart Lees is a pretty good operator and a key reason why Zero Down is a finalist in the Mitre 10 Excellence in Service Delivery Award and the Spyglass Excellence in Technology Award categories of the 2011 Westpac Auckland North Business Awards. He says that they entered the 2011 awards because... “this is a great way for us to take a segment of our business system and look at it from the perspective of ... how can we be the very best at this? What can we do to completely blow the competitors out of the water? The deadline is also very useful in making sure that we complete our projects in time to measure the results.”
To begin the story we probably need to understand just what ‘Zero Down’ means. Zero Down is essentially an IT support company, that Stuart tells us works in the reverse of the rest of the industry. Their proposition is just as the name suggests. They aim to assist their customers to have absolutely no IT downtime. Stuart came up with the brand when re-thinking what it was that their customers really wanted. He talked to a bunch of them and found that they actually did not want IT support, they would prefer to have no problems at all and would be happier spending their money to prevent issues. A point that the IT industry has seemingly missed.
“We help business people build highly productive companies by building and maintaining IT systems with 100% uptime,” explains Stuart Lees. “This creates more profit and less stress for our customers. Our sole mission is to prevent system downtime for our clients, to improve their productivity, profitability and sanity. We do this by the brutal execution of an IT maintenance, monitoring and support framework by a team of ridiculously dedicated people. Where most IT support companies focus on fixing problems, we are the champions of prevention.”
The Zero Down success to date has revolved around a very strong brand. The brand has been developed by Stuart in conjunction with Paul Pedrotti, from design and print Company Designation, which shares space in the same building. The strong Zero Down branding has provided a sound platform, from which a calculated advertising and marketing programme has been implemented.
Stuart has utmost faith in the brand and believes that “If the people don’t get the brand then they are not in the target market”. Stuart himself is very active from a networking and selling perspective. He tries to attend a meaningful business function at least once a week to mix and mingle. New customers don’t sign up overnight, so the process is all about building trust and confidence. Endorsements from existing customers and word of mouth also play a big part. Other key factors in the marketing of Zero Down are a strong website, Google, email marketing and a growing focus on Social Media.
The Zero Down business has been a long time in the making for Stuart Lees. As a youngster the born-and-bred North Shore lad had an interest in all things computerised. His first real job was in accounting
at Countrywide Bank. He worked his way through the ranks to the
Audit department.
Stuart credits this part of his career with setting him up ‘with a thorough grounding and some good habits of best practice’. Stuart worked next for the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron as a Systems Manager, building the organisations’ IT infrastructure for the hosting of the America’s Cup defence in 1997.
While on his ‘OE’ in Europe (from 1998) he worked in software development, software and IT Project Management in London. After two years he returned to tackle a major shared Service Centre project for Owens Global Logistics, where he spent several years setting up and running the new IT Operations Centre and also project managing the implementation of an ERP system (JD Edwards). It was here, with 1400 end-user customers and a $500 million bottom line, that he learnt the value of reliable IT systems and strong disaster recovery procedures.
After Owens, Stuart went into the supply side of the IT industry and was integral in the setup of the an eSecurity Division in a tech start-up and then the formation of RAD9 Computer Services which focussed solely on the SME sector. A desire to own his own business outright – and to implement the Zero Down business model that he believed was well overdue – resulted in Stuart launching Zero Down in mid-2010.
So what are the strengths of the Zero Down business?
“We have a strong team of ‘real people’,” says Stuart Lees. “We’re really picky when we select staff and are 100% happy with every single employee that we have. This is a powerful thing. We also have strong marketing. Most small firms say that they are going to do marketing, but mostly they just do bits and pieces here and there. We are also always looking for continuous improvement. We’re all really competitive people and we have a culture where we are happy to talk about the things that we don’t do so well and we work hard to fix them.”
Have there been any mistakes along the way? “Thinking that I was indispensable to the operations and not focusing my time on the important stuff like planning, numbers, execution and... customers. Not learning the art of delegation has held me back for years. Now that I have, they do it much better than me!”
“Be extremely focussed and selfish on what you spend your time on,” advises Stuart when asked if he has any other pieces of wisdom for others. “Because it is easy in business to spend time on things that won’t make a lick of difference next year.”
The Zero Down market is essentially in the small to medium enterprise (SME) area. But the market is a fast moving one. Over the past year it has been phenomenal how the rules have changed in the IT sector. While what they look after has traditionally been Windows-based, now it is just as likely to be Mac’s as well, so they look after businesses that have IT as their backbone. Their 10-strong technical team are really ‘device agnostic’. Cloud computing has also become an important part of the Zero Down proposition.
“We’re really enjoying growing the business at the moment,” advised Stuart Lees, when outlining his goals for the future. “The long term is about a larger company with a lot more happy clients, but we’re happy staying in the market that we are in, with a strong evolution towards Cloud Computing. We have specific numbers in mind regarding our growth, which are ambitious, and also have a strategy that “if we’re going to spend 50-60 hours per week working, it should always be fun.”
Stuart Lees lives on a lifestyle block with his wife Emma, son Ben (five) and daughter Sadie (one). As well as being a ‘computer geek’ he has always been the outdoors and sporty type and now shares a passion for horses with Emma. Stu and Emma currently work as volunteer foster parents for the Auckland SPCA and Stu is also an active supporter and Online Marketing Advisor for the PawJustice not for profit organisation.
For more information contact: - Stuart Lees, Zero Down,
Email: stuart@zdown.co.nz, Visit: www.zdown.co.nz
