Microsoft Partner of the Year - rags to riches

OK, not rags and not riches, but I couldn’t find a better analogy. More on that later. Those familiar with this world may have noticed that Cloudreach won the Microsoft Partner of the Year award in the UK. Not just for Azure, but the overall country prize. Impressive, I know.

Back in October, I took on the challenge of leading the Cloudreach Azure practice. In that post I stated that “right now I can’t think of a better way of furthering Cloudreach’s business”. This prediction not only materialised but exceeded all my expectations. We grew the practice globally by 300%+ in revenue, 500%+ in influenced Azure consumption, and other things measured in hundreds like certifications, delivery resources and so on.

In my biased view, our success is even more impressive when you consider the history and where we came from. Growing a business within a business is not always easy, as just pure inertia will pull a company towards what they have always done. We started from a small base and disadvantaged from that perspective And this is the “rags” part.

So, how did we get to “riches”? I’m a big believer in simplicity, focus and leading by example. And I don’t mean myself necessarily, but how the team behaves internally and externally. And this is how I believe you can grow any business if you have the right ingredients. And an amazing platform like Microsoft Azure, of course.

Firstly, we simplified our offerings into a set of solutions we were absolute experts on and had the capability to deliver. This allowed us to pass the “what do you want to be known for?” test and be very clear on what customers and Microsoft could call upon us for. But this is actually easier said than done, because to do it properly you have to make hard choices. You have to purposefully ignore things where there’s also economic opportunity. 

However, it allows you and the team to focus on clear priorities. This approach enabled us to have a crisp message to communicate our strengths to the market. And as importantly, to have a clear delivery strategy and set of skills required for success. 

What about leading by example? What I mean here is that you and your team should behave in a way that is an example for others. When we talk to customers or to Microsoft about Cloudreach and our capabilities, the team should inspire both confidence and trust. You have to deliver with enthusiasm and good humour, but with down-to-earth honesty and clarity. You want the people in the room (physical or virtual) to want to work with you, because you are seen as an example to follow.

There are of course a lot of other “business” things, like marketing and demand generation, pipeline and metrics, sales forecast, hiring and the rest, but I won’t bore the reader with that.

So, what next? I think it’s only going to go one way, and that is “up”. We feel the burden of responsibility the award puts on us to continue to deliver. So we plan to use this momentum as a platform to grow even faster and deliver even better results for our customers in FY21. The dream would be to repeat the feat elsewhere or in a specific skill set next year, but we have to wait and see. Will have to come up with another blog post title though.