My reflections on the last 12 months as I celebrate my first year as CEO of BT Enterprise!

The difference a year makes….!!

Anniversaries often make you pause and reflect and today is my one year anniversary as CEO of BT’s Enterprise business. So, I’ve been thinking about what we achieved over the past year and what the next year will bring.

If I cast my mind back, starting a new job, in a new country, without my family (who were unable to join me due to travel restrictions) in the middle of a pandemic and national lockdown wasn’t easy – even for an optimist like me!

Like so many of us, I craved face to face interactions with my colleagues, customers and stakeholders, because forging new relationships is critical when you start a new job. And although technology has been a wonderful enabler in keeping us virtually connected, there is simply no substitute for meeting and collaborating with people in person.

So to be here today – in our brand new HQ, with my team around me….and with my family having joined me in the UK and a real fire in my belly about the year ahead?– ?is a really great place to be!

To say it’s been a strange and challenging year would be an understatement. And everyone I’ve connected with over the past year will have had personal mountains to climb in dealing with the realities of living through a pandemic. Whether that’s been losing someone close to them, struggling with their mental and physical health, juggling home schooling with work commitments, or worrying about how their business will survive day to day.

It’s precisely because of these hardships that I couldn’t be prouder of my colleagues who worked so hard to keep the show on the road despite their own difficult circumstances. The teams that connected the Nightingale field hospitals and vaccination centres; the key workers who manned our call centre operations; the first responders who answered unprecedented volumes of 999 calls; our innovation experts who helped deliver the Life Lines virtual visiting solution for intensive care units. So to all of my colleagues who ensured that our network and capabilities delivered for our customers and the country over the past year – thank you.

I felt an enormous sense of relief when restrictions eased and I was able to get out and about to meet face to face with the various BT Enterprise teams around the UK. Visiting our teams in Glasgow, Hatfield, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast and Darlington was a real highlight for me. Not least because the passion and enthusiasm of our colleagues for driving digital innovation for our customers really shone through – in a way that can’t be conveyed as brilliantly using Zoom or Teams! I also loved getting hands-on whilst on the road – including activating a 5G site in Glasgow, seeing a day in the life of a 999 operator, and getting out and about with our customer, the RNLI!

Another highlight for me was our new focus on supporting the UK’s smallest firms and start-ups, with the creation of our new SoHo (Small office/Home office) unit. Launched in June, it got off to a flying start delivering full fibre broadband packages, unbreakable Wi-Fi, and new digital marketing tools and digital skills support to help these small businesses thrive. That’s just the beginning of our plans for this market, with BT Enterprise expanding into adjacent digital services, backed up by our digital skills training programme for small businesses, which has so far reached more than 300,000!

As for our larger corporate and public sector customers, we’re putting greater focus on customer solutions using components such as 5G Private Networks, IoT and Edge Computing by standing up our ‘Division X’ unit. Innovation only becomes real once it touches the customer, and this unit will help to accelerate the deployment of the latest tech across high growth industries like healthcare, transport and logistics. We have a great leader of Division X on board and some exciting developments in the pipeline, and I can’t wait to see these come to fruition!

Finally, the opening of our new state-of-the-art HQ in London and other revamped regional hubs around the UK, represents a major turning point for the company – signalling a more modern, agile, forward thinking BT. To do the best for our colleagues and customers, we’re upgrading to contemporary, flexible workspaces which are kitted out with the latest tech. This will bring our teams together in ways that simply weren’t possible before, transforming and speeding up the way we work. Being able to come together and collaborate in shared workspaces is absolutely central to BT supporting its colleagues, developing their careers, and achieving the company’s growth plans – so I’m looking forward to connecting with more of our teams face to face over the coming weeks.

If I reflect on the many things the pandemic has taught me over the past year – one of my learnings is that BT’s strength is absolutely grounded in the drive and talent of our people, the superiority of our networks, and the trust embedded in our brand. It’s shown me that BT really can be an agent of change for our business and public sector customers and, for the country, a force for good. That’s why I’m excited about what lies ahead as we draw a line under the last two years and step up our focus on our strategic growth plans for BT Enterprise. As we said in our annual kick off last year – lets go Enterprise!