Few women have scaled any heights of channel leadership in Australia. Most female staff in IT businesses muddle around in the marketing, human resources, administration and other ‘helpmeet’ areas.
Those job categories, while important, do not carry the kudos of public-facing, flagship roles such as general manager or chief executive.
That said, some women have managed to combine roles in more ‘traditional’ female areas such as sales with garnering some real power while still relatively young.
Katie McGorian, the 35-year-old sales director of Melbourne integrator Trident Computer Services, is one of those women.
Trident, as the name suggests, has three-pronged ownership. All three owners -- McGorian, Alex Freiberg and sole remaining company founder Mark Rak -- share decision-making and control duties. "Trident was started about 22 years ago, and two of the original owners have now retired," McGorian says.
McGorian -- a long term employee -- was offered a part-ownership of Trident three years ago in a plan to get the company running harder despite difficult economic times. She bought into the company in exchange for a percentage of her sales commission over a number of years. She did not have to pay any money up front.
Three years ago, Trident was struggling as margins began rapidly shrinking industry-wide. "Ten years ago, you used to be able to make $1500 on a notebook. These days, you’re lucky to make five percent,’ she says.
The company initially specialised in sales and support for customised accounting systems, NEC printers and PCs, but with the changes in the industry, has extended into system integration and managed services with an eye to communications, networking, database development and CRM.
"We’ve a big technical department. Now, we’re looking a little further, into managed services and voice and data integration," McGorian says.
Trident has also formed strong authorised partnerships with HP and Acer to add to its long-standing NEC deal. "Trident is in a very lucky position at the moment," she adds. "People are increasingly turning to smaller family companies. There are things a large manufacturer can’t do."
McGorian’s route to part-ownership of a successful channel company at 35 has not been typical. Two years after high school, she enrolled in university to study for a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in feminist film theory. She got halfway through before realising there were not many jobs in that area, she says, and swapping across to multimedia design.
She got a job with Trident right off the bat, coding HTML pages from scratch in the mid 1990s. "That was when web pages were starting to take off. That was very new. My first project was to set up a web page for a florist -- Apricot Flowers in Melbourne," McGorian recalls.
But after a year, Trident asked her to move across to sales when a position in the department fell vacant. "I wasn’t really the best web designer in the world, I have to admit. But it was much more cumbersome to create web pages then," McGorian says.
The sales rep who left that position -- Geoff Bentley -- is now her husband. McGorian credits him with helping her find her feet in the early days. Today he works in the solutions branch at long-time Trident vendor NEC. "I shouldn’t say he gave me a good leg up [in the industry] when he’s my husband, but you know what I mean," she quips.
They have three children -- 10-week-old Annabel, 20-month-old Harris and 13-year-old Andrew. "It took a long time to be able to have the second two," McGorian says.
McGorian says she wants four. "But my two partners at work would have a hernia if I had another child," she says.
She also seems keen to send them all to private schools (at $15,000 a year each) -- her eldest is already at one. She is also trying to complete a law degree, although she does not really envisage working in the law field post-graduation.
Some might say she is a sucker for punishment, given her current full-time-plus workload.
McGorian is somewhat cagey about her work-week schedule but admits she gets up around three or four o’clock every morning. She does not get home until at least six o’clock every night -- much later, if there’s a lot more work to do. She gets as much as possible done at home before dropping Andrew at school in time to arrive at work around quarter past eight. "But I don’t work on the weekends," she adds quickly.
She does end up studying on the weekends as well as in the early mornings, however, and it is a safe assumption that housework in the McGorian-Bentley residence isn’t off limits most Saturdays and Sundays either.
"Years ago, I did a time management and speed-reading course, which was the best thing I have ever done," she adds. "Getting up very early means I can get emails out of the way and do bits that are actually integral to my day."
McGorian, however, has not had a proper holiday since a trip to Noosa in 2001. A keen hobby surfer, along with her husband, she is currently looking forward to a reprise around April.
Bentley does help out -- he does a lot of evening cooking for the family and McGorian says he is much better at it than she is. "I’m very lucky to have a husband in IT who understands how demands happen and how plans might have to change," she says. "NEC, as well, is very understanding of these things. He obviously can’t breastfeed but he can do most other things."
McGorian says her job would basically be impossible if it was not for Trident’s ‘family-friendly’ policy and practice. Trident tries to work around the needs of families with children.
"I would never have thought it would be like this. In meetings, someone used to grab Annabel and someone else would grab Harris and I’d go to the meeting. And with clients, they really liked dealing with a pregnant woman," she says.
Customers liked the demonstrably family-friendly approach of Trident, she says, and it actually has helped the company win sales.
People with families of their own felt they had a connection with the company and most others genuinely appreciated what the integrator was trying to do, McGorian argues. "What we found with the babies is that clients become happier to deal with us. They like to deal with someone with a family-friendly policy," she says.
It undoubtedly helps that many clients have been using Trident services for a while and a level of accepted informality appears to have been reached -- something of which McGorian herself appears aware. "So unless it’s a very formal or professional meeting or we’ll be very long, I do bring my baby," she says. "And if I bring her along and she needs feeding, I feed her."
McGorian believes the IT industry in general needs to become more flexible and family-friendly, especially if it is to address the paucity of women at senior levels in the longer term. Women on the whole can make excellent IT staffers, due partly to what McGorian calls an ability to multi-task.
Women with families often make good organisers because they are used to juggling conflicting demands from imperious youngsters and relatives, she says.
Further, Trident habitually assigns a team, rather than a single person, to an account and ensures the customer is familiar with several account managers, instead of just one, from the start. That means sales and support do not go to hell in a handcart if one person happens to be busy or away. "We’ve also some feminist men in our company. The situation is very unusual," McGorian says.
"We didn’t want to be one of those companies where they say, 'Oh,
she’s taking time off again', but if a man does the same they say, 'Oh, he’s a wonderful father'."
Some commentators consider demands for workplaces to accommodate family needs as unfair to other staff. After all -- so the argument goes -- having a family these days is an option, not a necessity. Employers do not shift things around to suit other lifestyle choices, so why
should the reproductively inclined be treated differently?
However, it can also be argued that a family-friendly workplace is potentially more flexible and adaptable in other areas as well. So family-friendly policies may stand to benefit all workers in the long term -- not just pregnant women and their immediate kin. It is not just people with children that can find a rigid employer approach to human resources and work schedules onerous and stress-inducing.
McGorian says Trident’s family-friendly policy has sealed more deals than it has lost. And she claims her three young children sometimes give her an edge in the negotiating stakes.
McGorian says she has won deals for Trident with private schools in which part of the presentation suggested -- in a witty aside, of course -- that if they hire Trident, she might be well-placed to help them by enrolling her children there further down the track. McGorian has also earned points with some of her clients by taking them to spas or similar for business meetings "instead of doing the big lunch thing".
Although not everybody -- not even every woman -- thinks visiting spas, beauticians or manicurists is an ideal way to do business, the novelty is appreciated by many of the women McGorian deals with who also have families.
Yet further changes are in store for Trident, with McGorian, Freiberg and Rak at the helm. "We are hoping to open another site and we hope to have another 10 people on board over the next 16 months," McGorian says. "And we hope to increase our market share in education especially and become a channel that the education market knows it can come to."
Since McGorian came on board, Trident formed a company called Validate ‘that is an umbrella company of Trident’ for a stronger move into post-data security for email and websites.
"You can do an email and select what rights are given in that email. Who can open it, who can print it [et cetera]," she says. "That was quite innovative at the time and that’s something we still run with."
Trident has also made larger leaps and bounds into the education sector. "A lot of schools have highly confidential information," McGorian says.
Government deals are another area going well, she says, with Trident boasting ongoing and increasing numbers of deals with agencies in Victoria and elsewhere. The company opened a technical showroom in Melbourne for its larger clients in October. But there is no false pride for this integrator.
Trident has been in the business long enough to accept that no one company can know everything about all the best products available at any one time. The three chiefs have pledged that if the company does not have expertise or knowledge about a particular product, the company will go out and find what it is the customer requires.
Also, Trident has no plans to spread itself too thin. Good, strong work means staff and other resources on the ground in the locations concerned, McGorian says.
The company also has a ‘back to basics’ policy on communications. Many companies lose customers regularly by not responding promptly to external requests for information. So Trident insists that workers keep on top of their communications, answering phone calls and emails and getting back to potential customers with the answers as quickly as possible, McGorian says.
Schools in particular are hot on quick responses with no excuses. "And if there’s
a problem, even if it’s something we haven’t created, they want you to fix it so we do really go outside our job specifications," she says.
Making clients feel important in the scheme of things is crucial. "Alex [Freiberg] and I are changing the way this business is run," McGorian says.
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