Unblinded by the light

Whitech Software Solutions no longer need hide its light under a bushel. The abilities of this Sydney developer have begun shining out far and wide.

In some cultures, white is the colour of death, mourning and ghosts. That could not be farther from the truth for Telstra’s National and New South Wales Small Business of the Year -- Whitech Software Solutions.

Steve Delnawaz, founder and managing director of Whitech, says the company’s name was chosen partly because white also represents all the colours of the rainbow. Mix all wavelengths in the visible spectrum together, and the result is radiant white light. Like the sunlight.

“We liked it because white is for purity,” Delnawaz says. “And we can use it as a platform for working with Kodak’s yellow, Fuji’s green and Konica’s blue and blend all the colours.”

A POS-itive slant
 
It's just over 10 years since Whitech started up in May 1995. Delnawaz was at university at the time, with just three subjects left to complete his degree. “Then, this started to take off. My brother had just opened a photo shop and was looking for a POS program,” he recalls. “I wrote him one for free -- typical family stuff!”

Much to his surprise, people coming into his brother’s photo shop were impressed with his innovative POS application, initially dubbed Controlab, and began asking where it came from and whether they could get a copy for themselves.

Forced on to the horns of a dilemma, Delnawaz chose to concentrate on the opportunity presented by the new application and formed an embryonic company, at the same time ditching his degree. And it would seem he has no regrets -- none worth making a song and dance over, anyway. “I had to make a decision,” he says.

He had written the application in his spare time, drawing on programming skills he had acquired as a teenager by experimenting on the family computer.

“I got sick of playing games on the thing and started to hack into it and program it,” he says. “When I went to high school, I did a computer programming unit and did extremely well at that.”

Delnawaz stands out in a more familiar crowd of grey businessperson types for his exuberance and ability to laugh at himself and at the quirks of the world. Some unkind or jealous types might call that naïveté. Others might say he has just the right combination of faith, optimism and enthusiasm to succeed where more conventional approaches have failed.

That is certainly the slant the judges seemed to favour in this year’s Telstra Small Business Awards. Whitech Software Solutions won the NSW Small Business of the Year accolade, and then beat out the other semi-finalists to take the top prize. The Telstra Small Business of the Year Awards are arguably the most coveted prizes in the SMB community.

Bizarrely, Telstra is somewhat wary about saying why its judges favoured any particular company and has refused to comment in detail on how Whitech won the competition.

All Telstra would concede that it was a combination of a range of criteria that netted Whitech the top award, out of a field of 31 other finalists from around Australia.

Whitech has since announced that all the $38,000 prize money from its NSW and national Telstra awards has been donated to the Cancer Council of NSW for Daffodil Day.

“We’ve had a very good few years -- 2001 was very difficult, and in 2000 the market crashed. We weren’t directly affected by the dotcom stuff, but we were indirectly. Since then, it has been fantastic,” Delnawaz says.

Whitech is making a profit of around 33 percent before tax and its margins are growing. Turnover has increased 120 percent year-on-year. “We’re growing exponentially, year-on-year,” he says.

In English heraldry, white signified brightness, virtue and innocence. In Whitech’s case, those traits may be leading to quite some celebration and have seemingly helped Delnawaz forge his own approach untainted by prior business experience.

Delnawaz could not even get into computer science at university the first year he tried. So many people wanted to go on the course that the grades required were beyond what he had managed at school, he says. Then he “got smart”, he says, and a year later decided to apply for entry to the undergraduate course in physics instead -- and was accepted.

Most people believe physics is a more rigorous academic discipline than computing. However, fewer people applied for that course, pushing Delnawaz to the head of the queue. His success in the harder discipline helped him transfer to computer science the following year.

“It was a very popular subject!” he says. “But two years into that, I started to write the application for my brother. By the third year, the business was starting. So I just quit.”

Delnawaz has a love of learning new things, but he also learnt rapidly that it need not be through formal education. He has been quick to take a lesson from many different sources over the course of his life -- make a decision and move on.

His lateral approach applies to staff policies and practices too. Unlike the majority of business school graduates out there running companies, many of whom seem to treat staff as little more than another asset (when they toe the management line) and a liability (when they develop pesky thoughts and opinions of their own), Delnawaz seems to really mean it when he says he listens to his staff. “Whitech itself, I think, is a funny company. And we have a very small staff turnover,” he says. “I generally hear they’re very happy here. Although I’m sure they lie to me all the time!”

Delnawaz points out that he himself has never been exposed to a “standard” or corporate workplace, so he just does things his way.

Everyone spends a lot of time at work -- often far more time than with friends and family -- so they need to be happy and there must be a good workplace environment with open lines of communication if staff are going to be productive, Delnawaz suggests.

“We do take our staff out regularly,” he says. “That’s actually very important because you give them a few drinks and they get a bit tipsy and tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

Many heads can make light work and give truly innovative solutions. But that can only happen in an atmosphere of openness, trust and respect. “We never shoot the messenger,” Delnawaz says.

“I’ve never done that. I’m still learning how to manage a company,” he adds. “We’ve a very flat structure and anybody can walk up and say what he or she thinks.”

When there’s nothing more to learn, Delnawaz believes he might lose interest and move on. “It’s never been about the money,” he says.

As it is, Whitech is a company that from its earliest days has been open to diversification in all directions. It has not stopped at POS. When other opportunities have appeared, Delnawaz and his team have taken them on. That has sometimes led Whitech into quite undiscovered realms -- so far successfully.

From specialising in photography-specific solutions, Whitech has diversified into general retail. When the GST was announced, the developer got to work building an application for the new tax that would appeal to any kind of retailer.

“And in 2001, we entered the [photographic] kiosk business,” he says. Whitech today makes and sells business professional, fashion, furniture, jewellery and photographic POS applications as well as PhotoTeller digital photography kiosks and a PhotoTeller home ordering digital photography software.

Major photographic vendors such as Kodak, Konica Minolta and Fujifilm and retailers such as Camera House and Rabbit Photo have teamed up with Whitech to offer solutions. The Cancer Council of NSW, Visiongraphics professional photography laboratories and US-based Fossil Watches are among its customers.

Delnawaz has also started a second small business, called Alpha Phone Words, that leases telephone numbers spelling words, such as Whitech’s phone word 1300 KIOSKS. “But, obviously, IT is our core business,” Delnawaz says.

Whitech now has offices in London, New York and Sydney and distributors in places as far flung as Portugal, Canada, Norway and New Zealand. In Australia, it has 27 staff but a total of 50 around the globe.

The ISV is looking to expand into other countries as well. “That’s really the next phase for us,” Delnawaz says.


Building on tradition
 
The Delnawaz family came to Australia as refugees from Iran, a country with more than 8000 years of human civilisation marred, as usual, by not a few upheavals. However, Delnawaz puts more of his success down to what he learnt from his family than to anything in the refugee experience or inherent in Persian or Iranian culture.

His father, especially, was a major influence. As a successful businessman and entrepreneur in Iran, his father had never stopped valuing and listening to his staff. “He was a people person,” he says.

And Whitech has remained a family affair, with Delnawaz’ two brothers and two sisters all gradually joining up after the first two years. His younger brother has run the New York office for the past four years.

“My older brother has just moved to New York as well,” Delnawaz says. “And my two younger sisters work in my office in Sydney, and it has been great to work with family.”

Wife Sara keeps the family on an even keel and organises quality time with their two sons, aged six and four. “That’s a big enough challenge in itself. She’s very fantastic,” he says. “You have to put that in!”

What little spare time Delnawaz has, he shares with his family “doing whatever they decide”, he says.

Meanwhile, winning Telstra Small Business of the Year seems to be attracting punters from all over. A lot of interest has been shown in response to Whitech’s suddenly elevated profile and Delnawaz says he’ll strike while the iron is hot. “The approach seems to be starting to pay off,” Delnawaz laughs. “But it’s not as big as I’d like it to be, that’s for sure!”