What Does It Take to Build a Resilient Tech Company?

In this Entrepreneur UK interview, Rob Gamlin, founder of Oxfordshire based VoCoVo, reflects on his journey from developing early communication technologies to founding a company that aims to improve collaboration within retail teams. He discusses the challenges, including navigating the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and offers practical insights on entrepreneurship and leadership.

What inspired you to start your business?
VoCoVo started as a natural extension of the technology-driven work I had been doing in the years prior. My background is in product and solution development, having spent the early years of my career developing my engineering, product design, software and hardware skills. My passion for technology and adeptness at finding solutions led me to experiment with all sorts of innovations.

In the late 1990s I was working on a project to develop radio paging technology for a comms company, which was followed by a specific request from a big retail brand for a similar solution. That’s where I saw a niche in the retail market. And ultimately, that’s the trick – when you’re developing a new product or starting a new company, finding your niche is so important.

In this instance, it was a communication device that solves real life problems and improves people’s everyday lives. VoCoVo is so much more than its tech, VoCoVo enhances customer experiences and unites retail teams to deliver better performance for retail brands. Once I had worked that out, I knew we had a business, not just a product.

What was your biggest challenge and how did you overcome it?
In any business, challenges come at you all the time, no matter how prepared or resilient you believe your business is. The COVID-19 pandemic for example presented some huge micro and macro challenges we still experience today, and its shadow threw up significant supply chain issues for many businesses, including VoCoVo. As a leader and founder, challenges draw deeply upon your mental resilience and need to maintain and convey calm positivity. It is in those moments you rely heavily upon the people you have and the strengths and beliefs you have built to be able to rise above it and keep going.

Related: A Vision for a Fair Marketplace

How did you secure your initial funding?
I developed VoCoVo from the ground up. It was the successor to our previous product, VoicePage. My company is 100% privately owned, and we have consistently reinvested profits into people, products, and solutions first. We have been fortunate enough to have had some great customer wins along the way to allow us to do this. Sure, in the early days not taking on external funding meant taking on a lot of the work ourselves, and sometimes it requires making your first release fit your budget and not your ideals. But, these decisions ensure we can keep investing in great new products and the best people.

How do you handle failure or setbacks?
In a word, “quickly”. Failure is what you make it. I have had some huge failures that have taught me so much. I know it’s a cliche, but every failure is a gift that helps you do it better, differently, or not at all next time around.

In the early days, we lost a big opportunity to a competitor; that initially felt like a major setback. I used the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that loss to learn precisely what I needed to do not to lose again. That loss became the motivation that turned an idea swimming around in my head into the creation of VoCoVo.

What advice would you give to someone starting their own business?
To get a business off the ground, there’s no doubt you must be prepared to take some risks. Sometimes, it requires a level of courage and self-belief that many may think they don’t have. Don’t just believe something because you think it’s true; question and validate your beliefs dispassionately without ego or arrogance until your courage and passion outweigh your doubt. Then just do it – the outcome is irrelevant.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Other people’s input, opinions and expertise are essential to building a successful business, and if you are genuine, you will elicit the right help and advice you need. And as soon as you can, hire great people with contrasting skills to complement each other and contribute to driving the organisation forward.

Be pragmatic about when to launch a product that may not yet meet all of your ideals. That might strike fear into the perfectionists out there, but I don’t believe a business can perfect its offering or product without substantial feedback. Successful products result from listening to customers and continually refining and improving.

How do you stay motivated during tough times?
Every day I see each member of the VoCoVo team showcasing such a strong belief in the brand and our mission to improve the lives of retail employees. We know that the work we’re doing has a direct impact on people’s experience of working in retail – and our customers remind us of that daily. It means that even in those challenging moments that we all feel from time-to-time, I’m reminded of our purpose and the commitment everyone at VoCoVo gives to achieving it.

And secondly, because we have only really scratched the surface of what we can achieve. We have made a real difference to the operations of many of the UK’s largest retailers, but there is so much more work to be done. Not only are we broadening our solutions to the convenience and small retail store sectors, but we’re pressing ahead with our aim to be an integral part of retail operations around the world. We’re currently expanding in the US and mainland Europe, which brings with it an incredible amount of excitement.

Share your tips for achieving success
So much of success is about understanding the target market. Speaking from my own experience, people from technology backgrounds can be prone to over-engineering and over-complicating a solution, but it’s about understanding how that technology solves a market need. It comes back to finding that all-important niche, and continually striving to be the very best business serving it.

In the context of what makes a successful leader, I’ve always been very focused on ensuring that none of our people have negative experiences at work. Without fulfilled, motivated people, it’s impossible to achieve sustained success. Everyone has a different metric by which they judge how good or bad their job is, but any good CEO should ensure that people feel comfortable, stable, and enjoy their work. Naturally, that’s not always going to end up being the case, but it always remains the goal.