Alan Stephenson-Brown of Evolve on How Digital Transformation Can Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Jason Hartman

Even though we think of innovation as a technical thing, my answer is, it’s all about supporting and encouraging employees. Companies with a culture of innovation empower their people to come up with ideas. I would say that I take forward most of the ideas and suggestions I receive at a technical level to be discussed internally. Supporting our people and their growth is key to everything we do as a business.

As part of my series about the “How to Navigate and Succeed in the Modern World of Finance”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alan Stephenson-Brown.

Alan Stephenson-Brown is CEO at leading managed networks provider Evolve Business Group and has overseen its growth trajectory from a Guest Wi-Fi and connectivity provider to a fully managed network solution, including best-in-class SD-WAN and business connectivity with around-the-clock IT support.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thinking about how I got started, it was in banking and pre-Microsoft, so banks like Halifax wrote all their own programmes, they didn’t outsource anything. They even had their own internal email programmes. There were really no external supplier relationships, other than hardware providers.

I worked closely with this kind of tech as it emerged, especially as I progressed my career with HSBC, a global operation quick to adopt new technologies. As the industry changed, there was a lot of work from an IT perspective around how to remain compliant, and in infrastructure and innovation, and I enjoyed working with these elements, so I moved into a division for the networking side of the business, looking after things like branch infrastructure.

Today, I’m CEO at managed networks provider Evolve, and the speed at which we can make change happen is incredible.

In the early days of my career, there was no concept of going home and looking at your emails on a device at home. The only way I would know what was happening was when I walked into the office the next morning and there’d be 10 brown envelopes on my desk from different departments. I’d respond on a piece of paper and put it in an internal post. It used to take weeks or months for changes to take effect. It was time consuming!

Today’s speed is something to be celebrated. Now, somebody can send me an email, and I could make a change within a system within two minutes. However, I’m very aware of work life balance. We’ve got Zoom, we’ve got Teams, we’ve got WhatsApp, as well as our emails. So as an IT leader today, a focus on wellbeing and work life balance is vital. Yes, we can send an instant message, but we shouldn’t expect instant replies.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful to who helped to get you where you are? Can you share a story?

I still have a lot of admiration for a gentleman who ran and founded a company I worked for, called Jack McDonnell. He was a serial entrepreneur, but if you met him, you would never have known how successful he was. He really inspired my values from a customer and employee perspective. He had the greatest respect for all his people and the work they did. It’s something I’ve tried to hold close to my heart as well.

When he was in the office, he would come around and speak to everybody, and, again, that’s something I’ve learned from. There are so many good reasons to speak to people, find out about them, find out what they’re doing and stay close to what’s going on. That’s something I’ve always valued and always try to do.

Extensive research suggests purpose driven businesses are more successful in many areas. When Evolve started, what was its vision & purpose?

When the company was originally founded in 2005, the purpose was very much to provide Guest Wi-Fi services, with the move towards businesses wanting to be able to capture data and be able to use that to market to their customer base. At that time, there wasn’t really a Wi-Fi solution for the hospitality sector.

While best-in-class service was important then, we can see how the business has evolved from being very product-focused in terms of its purpose, to today the focus being on delivering an overall service, which includes the delivery of technology.

If you look at the direction we’re moving towards, we have an extensive suite of products and services to meet the kind of needs the businesses have now, and we’re already expanding that by integrating more fully, asking, how can we help the customer monitor their internal services in their own applications?

The vision has largely stayed the same, to resolve business’s technological challenges, however, today’s market requires managed networks providers to react with ever greater pace, dedication and curiosity.

Are you working on any new exciting projects?

Our service monitoring offering has expanded so we are now offering service monitoring for other third-party products and services included in a customer’s application, rather than just the products we support. We have rolled this out to the fuel forecourt sector, and we are expanding it to the hospitality sector now.

We can monitor whether things like credit and debit card payments and loyalty and engagement services are operating. We can monitor delivery services, and we know whether things like a fuel controller are actually online and operating. We provide a dashboard with the full picture of everything that is happening with a business’s essential technology.

Because we know when services are up and down, we can help a business understand their pain points. For example, if we had a customer with 1,000 locations, and they have five critical services at each location, we can see the status of all those services. From that we’re able to give the business a better insight into what’s happening. We might detect things like, at every one of the thousand locations, a specific service goes down at 3am for 10 minutes. It’s surprising, but this is the kind of thing that businesses might never know is happening!

I would say that is extremely unique in the industry at this moment in time.

For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in Digital Transformation?

The way to look at it is to ask, how can we streamline our business, and how can digital transformation be used to achieve that? So, for us at Evolve, it means using new technologies and solutions to create our network operations centre, which is a single touchpoint to understand where a problem may be. Being streamlined in this way allows us the proactivity to show the customer that we have already identified and are working on any problem that arises, and that they don’t need to worry.

On a day-to-day basis, in our network operations centre, we do all the work in the background to ensure a site continues to work in the event of different types of failures. As far as the site is concerned, they’re still able to transact, to take payments, they’re still able to do stock control, still dispense fuel, still serve food, etc. Meanwhile, because of the products and services that we have tied to the technology we have at the site level, we’re already working on fixing issues that the customer may never even be aware of. So, we’re using that digital capability to create automation, simplifying what we do as an operation, and then using that simplification to provide the best service to our customers.

And which kind of companies do you think will benefit the most from digital transformation?

Absolutely businesses with multiple sites, which operate in sectors like hospitality or fuel forecourts. From those with 50 sites or more, those with more like 10,000 and a strong international presence, digital transformation has powerful streamlining benefits.

In the hospitality and fuel forecourt sectors, many businesses have a disparate number of services and suppliers, and disparate connectivity across sites. Digital transformation means bringing all that together into one common platform, so they can focus on running their business rather than worrying about the IT and digital aspects.

In what way can a company use Digital Technology to take it to the next level?

The intelligent use of data and how it plays into decision making is a key consideration here. I think the new product I talked about plays into this question very well, as it is all about collecting data and presenting businesses with something that is actually meaningful to them. Because of our relationship with Mako Networks and having our own internal development team, we have been able to develop solutions that can capture and present all the data our operations team and the businesses need to make decisions.

Using technology in this way gives businesses significant insight, which would not have been possible before. It allows them to see what is happening within the business and make strategic plans about what to do next. We can show this detailed picture at site level, up to the status of all the sites, however many there are. We can look at the status of key services and devices at a company level, a regional level, a country level.

Historically, such data was never in any central location or in a format which someone could interrogate. So, from a leadership perspective, people can see very quickly where they may have issues, whereas they previously would never have known about them.

How do you think companies can create a culture of innovation in order to create competitive advantages?

Even though we think of innovation as a technical thing, my answer is, it’s all about supporting and encouraging employees. Companies with a culture of innovation empower their people to come up with ideas. I would say that I take forward most of the ideas and suggestions I receive at a technical level to be discussed internally. Supporting our people and their growth is key to everything we do as a business.

Can you please share your favourite life lesson quote, and how it was relevant to you in your life?

One of the biggest life lessons for me came when I was running another business and we had a piece of critical equipment that caught fire, and the impact was immense. There were a lot of senior and tech people running around trying to work out what we could do to fix it and to recover services.

I thought, we need to go back to basics. So, I literally walked out of the office for an hour, to sit and think about what I could do faced with that situation. After some time had passed, I had this amazing brainwave about the best next step forward.

So, the lesson is don’t just jump in, pause before you act, communicate, or make a critical decision. I avoid making decisions on the spot, I make sure I take a step back and work out the implications of the decision I’m going to make.

Finally, how can our readers further follow your work?

They can follow me or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-stephenson-brown-2203b8/.

Thank you for your time, and your excellent insights! We wish you continued success.

About The Interviewer: Jason Hartman is the Founder and CEO of Empowered Investor. Jason has been involved in several thousand real estate transactions and has owned income properties in 11 states and 17 cities. Empowered Investor helps people achieve The American Dream of financial freedom by purchasing income property in prudent markets nationwide. Jason’s Complete Solution for Real Estate Investors™ is a comprehensive system providing real estate investors with education, research, resources and technology to deal with all areas of their income property investment needs. Through Jason’s podcasts, educational events, referrals, mentoring and software to track your investments, investors can easily locate, finance and purchase properties in these exceptional markets with confidence and peace of mind.

Starting with very little, Jason, while still in college at the age of 19, embarked on a career in real estate. While brokering properties for clients, he was investing in his own portfolio along the way. Through creativity, persistence and hard work, he earned a number of prestigious industry awards and became a young multi-millionaire. Jason purchased a California real estate brokerage firm that was later acquired by Coldwell Banker. He combined his dedication and business talents to become a successful entrepreneur, public speaker, author, and media personality. Over the years he developed his Complete Solution for Real Estate Investors™ where his innovative firm educates and assists investors in acquiring prudent investments nationwide for their portfolio. Jason’s sought after educational events, speaking engagements, and his popular “Creating Wealth Podcast” inspire and empower hundreds of thousands of people in 189 countries worldwide.

While running his successful real estate and media businesses, Jason also believes that giving back to the community plays an important role in building strong personal relationships. He established The Jason Hartman Foundation in 2005 to provide financial literacy education to young adults providing the all-important real world skills not taught in school which are the key to the financial stability and success of future generations. We’re in a global monetary crisis caused by decades of misguided policies and the cycle of financial dependence has to be broken, literacy and self-reliance are a good start. Visit JasonHartman.com for free materials and resources.