Profile: Channel survivor

Andy Hegedus, director of Melbourne-based systems integrator Southern Cross Computer Systems, is one of the IT industry’s true survivors.

Since setting up the company with his wife, Joan, in 1982, SCCS has turned a profit every single year and is still going strong despite the constant run of mergers, takeovers and acquisitions that has characterised the channel in recent years.

After graduating from RMIT in 1961 with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, Hegedus joined Swedish electrical power engineering company, Asea.

After spending six years with the company, including a four-year secondment in Sweden, Hegedus saw an ad in the newspaper. "It said: 'Engineers, accountants and scientists, are you frustrated with your job?'

"It turned out that that was how IBM recruited back in those days. They were basically looking for people who didn’t quite fit in with their chosen profession," he says.

After joining IBM, Hegedus spent two years as a trainee -- there were no computer degrees in 1968 -- before spending time as a systems engineer. He then jumped the fence into sales, or went on quota as he puts it, and notched up a total of eight-and-a-half years with Big Blue selling time share, banking applications and mini computers.

He then joined Honeywell as the national sales manager of its time share division and spent two years there before moving to Wang as its national accounts manager. After three years at Wang, he decided it was time to go out on his own and he started Southern Cross Computer Systems with his wife Joan, then the charge sister at St Vincents’ Hospital Casualty Department.

"I started up SCCS because I had always wanted to do my own thing and I figured I could do things better (I was young in those days) than some of the large companies.

"And since founding it [SCCS], I have always emphasised three principles: never compromise on quality; always make sure the customer gets value for money and what they need, not necessarily what they tell you they want; and respect the individual," he says.

For Hegedus, respecting the individual means that the company encourages people to have a healthy balance between life and work. "Unlike some large companies, we don’t particularly like employees to work 120 hours a week, we want people to have a balance in life and there’s been a lot of emphasis in career planning rather than performance reviews."

Hegedus and his wife do not just talk about work-life balance, they live it. Hegedus is a ‘racing man’, as he puts it. "We have had racehorses ever since I was working with Wang. My current horse is called Real Soon Now.

"We also once had a sixth share in a horse called Never Under Charge which won the Foster’s Stradbroke Handicap [one of the biggest horse races in Queensland] and when I first started the company, the horses I had then were probably making more money than the company," he says.

These days, SCCS has 50 staff and has secured some good size contracts, rolling out a wireless network for the Department of Education and Training and designing a network for the Victorian Parliament.

Hegedus says SCCS’ ability to compete well against much larger organisations comes down to its emphasis on training, its capacity to retain employees and making sure it does everything well.

"We’ve got a huge training budget -- both maintenance and new training -- and as a result we have a very low attrition rate. We have got contracts with companies such as Telstra through the quality of our repair centre, which is something a lot of companies don’t think is very important anymore.

"The CEO has been here for 10 years, the operations manager joined a few weeks after me and there are a lot of 15- year veterans with the company. We look after people and they treat the company like it’s their own, which helps us punch above our weight."