Fast50: IBM business partner doubles revenue to land No.6 spot

Cirrus Australia is Darren Phillips' sixth successful IT company, but it is the first he has built in Australia after immigrating 10 years ago.

"All I've done is build businesses," he says, mostly in the US until he decided to improve his quality of life and move Down Under. "It's very easy to build an organisation that is profitable in the US but you may not necessarily be happy doing that," he says.

The past financial year was Cirrus' "best year on record", he says. The IBM Premier Business Partner doubled revenue.
Phillips attributes success to a formula of "sticking to quality".

"The organisation was built on quality delivery, so [during the downturn] it was really continuing on the path that was working. This whole idea of using quality-of-life to measure outcomes has been absolutely fantastic," he says.

Phillips desires quality-of-life for staff and customers and he achieves it by recognising what motivates staff and what motivates customers; he then aligns the business.

"Technical people aren't motivated by the financials, they're motivated by really getting an outcome; a technical person's quality-of-life is about a piece of code - to them, that's poetry. When [staff] are aligned with the customer's quality-of-life, they go to the extreme to make sure it works because that's how they feel great when they go home at the end of the day."

Other factors have contributed to Cirrus' year-on-year growth. Part of it was IBM's push towards partners that were qualified and certified, such as Cirrus. The other was Cirrus' ability to partner strongly.

Darren Phillips predicts a healthy future for Cirrus and says growth was always part of the plan.