From Startup to Giant: Lessons in Growth from PaperCut’s Co-Founder

“That’s where small companies have a superpower. It’s like when you’ve got a tight-knit group of people who really understand each other and understand what needs to be done, understand how everything works, you can move very fast.”
Matt Doran

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Growing Your Business: How Matt scaled PaperCut from a two-person startup of university friends to a global company with clients like Google
• Planning Corporate Strategy: Anchoring the direction of a company & how to meaningfully plan ahead
• Building Psychological Safety: Establishing an environment where team members feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks
• Maintaining Small Business Cultures: Staying nimble, reactive and open in communication while growing in team size and expectation
• Problem-Solving: Learning the art of solving problems & the mindset needed to be balanced, calm & quick in doing so

Key links

PaperCut
Chris Dance
Tom Clift
Google PaperCut Testimonial
WeWork
Matt’s LinkedIn

About our guest
Matt Doran is the co-founder of PaperCut, a global leader in print management software. The company is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, and has offices in the US and the UK, employing over 250 people.

Matt pursued studies in computer science and electrical engineering and spent seven years in software consulting before teaming up with his co-founder, Chris Dance, to establish PaperCut in 2004. Through organic growth and without taking on external investors, they transformed PaperCut into the global market leader in the print management market.

About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: Hello everybody. This week we’ve got a super special episode lined up as we talk to an entrepreneur and intrapreneur all rolled into one. For those of you who prefer to watch the podcast on the YouTube channel, we started with a bit of a sticky note quiz, and that reveals a little bit more about our guest’s background.

So if you’re curious, make sure you tune in there for some surprise facts. My esteemed guest today is Matt Doran, co-founder of PaperCut, a global leader in print management software. The company is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and has offices in the US and the UK employing over 250 people. Matt studied in computer science and electrical engineering and spent seven years in software consulting before teaming up with his co-founder Chris Dance, to establish PaperCut in 2004. Through organic growth and without taking on external investors, they transform PaperCut into the global market leader in the print management market. And for the past three years, IDC has recognised PaperCut as the market leader in this sector. In PaperCut Matt’s primary responsibilities were in [00:01:00] technology and product engineering.

As the company expanded, his emphasis then shifted towards People and Culture. And recently Matt transitioned from his operational role, but remains an active member of the PaperCut board. This is a tale that provides a rare glimpse into the mindset of a hugely successful business leader and reveals how people in startups, scale ups and globally known corporate entities can gear up for personal and organisational growth.

Let’s jump in.

[00:01:23] Hey Matt, really great to have you on the Company Road podcast this week, and I’ve been really incredibly excited to have you on the show, as you’re kind of a big deal. And before we get into it, I thought we might start with a bit of an energiser, as we do in our line of work.

Sometimes we start a session with a bit of a, an icebreaker of some sort, and it’s a bit of a tongue in cheek type quiz. If you have your sticky notes ready all I’m gonna do is I’m gonna ask you to write a number onto your sticky note, and you’re gonna show your number on the screen.

And I’ll do the same from my experience and we’ll kind of compare notes as we go through, if that’s okay.

[00:01:56] Matt Doran: All right.

[00:01:56] Chris Hudson: first question. How many years have you been in the working world?

[00:02:00] Matt Doran: Oh,

[00:02:01] Chris Hudson: You gotta write it down. Don’t, don’t say it. You gotta write it down.

[00:02:05] Matt Doran: all right. I gotta do the calculation. Yep.

[00:02:07] Chris Hudson: Let’s show? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Do you remember your starting salary?

[00:02:14] Matt Doran: I dunno if I do, I could have a guess.

[00:02:16] Chris Hudson: Have a guess.

[00:02:17] Matt Doran: Australian dollars, of course. we go. Okay. I bet you might, it may not be true. Who knows long

[00:02:25] Chris Hudson: Right? It may not be true. How many people do you reckon you’ve hired in your career?

[00:02:29] Matt Doran: directly or indirectly.

[00:02:31] Chris Hudson: Write both down.

[00:02:32] Matt Doran: Oh, geez.

[00:02:33] Chris Hudson: I dunno the exact number either, but there we go.

[00:02:36] Matt Doran: well, where is that?

[00:02:37] Chris Hudson: Yeah. How many people that you’ve worked with in some way over that time stand out as being truly inspirational to you?

[00:02:46] Matt Doran: hard question. Wow. All right.

[00:02:49] Chris Hudson: Okay.

[00:02:51] Matt Doran: maybe I’m generous.

[00:02:53] Chris Hudson: How many resumes do you reckon you’ve review reviewed in your career?

[00:02:56] Matt Doran: Oh, we’re pretty close there.

[00:03:01] Chris Hudson: How many times in your career do you reckon you’ve needed to update your resume?

[00:03:06] Matt Doran: Mine’s gonna be very unusualtwice.

[00:03:10] Chris Hudson: Why do you think I’m asking you all these questions? That’s the end of it.

[00:03:14] Matt Doran: Get me thinking about my career.

[00:03:16] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it’s mainly because you’ve had a long and extremely successful career with one company mainly. And we wanna hear your story. So can you walk us through where it all began and tell us what happened, what was your inspiration to begin with? And let’s hear your story.

[00:03:30] Matt Doran: Yeah. Okay. Well, the business is PaperCut. I mean, just to give you an, a higher level overview, we build print management software, which sounds like, you know, what the hell is that? The basic idea started in high schools where my business partner interned or did holiday work during university where he saw piles of paper piled up, just where students would print out, ridiculous amount of stuff and never pick it up.

[00:03:53] And that was the idea, a very simple idea of just trying to reduce waste. And he was like, surely there’s a, a better way than just-

[00:04:01] So that, that was the very simple idea. We knew each other at uni and sort of finished around the same time. I did software engineering. He was doing not software engineering, so he was picking my brains and we sort of kicked it off.

[00:04:13] It was his little side project.

[00:04:16] We end up moving out of home together into a share house. So we have a very long history together into a share house and he was writing the software and I was helping him really not part of the business at that stage. And a few years go by, we’re in our careers, I’m in the software consultant, you know, doing that typical software consultant thing, working in enterprises around Melbourne.

[00:04:35] My business partner also, Chris got a job in software as well. And then a few years later he just called me up and said, I wanna do PaperCut full time. Do you wanna join me? And that was it, about 2004. That’s almost 20 years ago now. A long time.

[00:04:50] Hence why I’ve only updated my resume maybe a couple of times. I got my first job, had one job for 7 years, and then PaperCut for 20. And that’s, that’s it.

[00:04:57] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Wow. With that start, was it a big recruitment process? What was the kickoff there? Was it just a meeting in a pub somewhere, or what, how did it all happen?

[00:05:05] Matt Doran: I mean, the story of PaperCut is one of organic incremental growth. We were just two young guys in our twenties kind of thought we knew how to build some software and had a bit of an idea for a product, and it was sort of the age where, selling software on the internet became.

[00:05:20] Just much more accessible. So it was like there’s an opportunity here to just to do something and, and make it work.

[00:05:24] Chris had got the business to a point where it was sort of online, small scale. It was earning a little bit of income and so we could make by while we get got started.

[00:05:33] And really the first year or so was just us two in our rented houses in a spare room just tapping away. He’d sort of neglected the product for a bit working on in his career. So he got it going, got it revived a little bit and then started the project of rebuilding the product from scratch with what he’d learned over the first few years of the part-time thing.

[00:05:54] And we did that for a year or so, and the guts of that product is what is still used today. It was just us two and it probably took us a year or so before we said, oh, we’ll be brave enough to get our own office and hire our first employee. That was after we’d worked in about three or four different rented houses as we within about a year.

[00:06:13] From there it was just very incremental. We hired one, it was like a graduate software engineer, so we didn’t have that much money. It was just like, buy in at the low end. And that employee is still with us today. Unbelievably, Tom Clift, if he’s listening to this he’s still is today, like 20 years later.

[00:06:29] We had this really quite crappy office above like a hairdresser in Mount Waverley in Melbourne and just, just hired one at a time hiring always software developers. We were just software geeks building a product. And we probably had five or six software engineers before we hired our first non-software engineer, which was a support person.

[00:06:47] And it was just always very incremental, just always self-funded, just doing what felt right through that journey.

[00:06:54] Chris Hudson: How did you know what to do both within yourself and within the team that you’re working, and how did you find out about where to play to each other’s strengths a little bit?

[00:07:03] Matt Doran: So much of it is on instinct. I mean, Chris and my business my business partner it’s worked out so well because we, at our core, we, we have very similar values, I think, and we don’t have to say too much to each other to know exactly what each other is thinking.

[00:07:16] And we compliment each other really well. And most of the time, in those early days in particular, everybody was in the room and everybody did everything. You really played it by ear on how, who did what and when. I mean, as we got bigger that changed a lot.

[00:07:30] As we, we spread out into domains where we weren’t familiar, marketing or sales or the other operations and accounting and all the other things that you’ve gotta do that, that changed. But yeah, those early days, it was very close knit and, quite different to what it felt like in the end when we had 250 people,

[00:07:47] Chris Hudson: So was it a steady climb to 250? Did it go big and then smaller, or did it just, did it just grow fairly steadily?

[00:07:53] Matt Doran: It probably took us five or so years to get to 20. And then there was a bit of a hockey stick and I think one year we hired about 40 people and that was like a shock and it sort of just kept going from there. It was probably like a slow burn for five years.

[00:08:09] We got to 25 people in that Mount Waverley office. We were exploding out of the walls when we’d taken over the whole building. Basically spent a lot of money moving into Hawthorn and outgrew that within like 18 months and had to do it all again and build another office. So yeah, it was exciting times.

[00:08:26] And because we’re global software business as well, we’re also hiring people overseas, which is like a whole other thing.

[00:08:32] Chris Hudson: When did that start? Was that quite early on or?

[00:08:35] Matt Doran: It was quite early on. I think somebody who resold our software at one point they liked it and we ended up, they were sort of supporting the software as a reseller and we hired them as a contractor, then it was a few contractors, then a little office, and it was mostly, there was virtually no management over there.

[00:08:51] We were sort of managing them from Australia. That’s in Portland, Oregon in the US and we did that for a while. In the UK we had our, one of our partners representing us for a long time before we did it ourselves. And it was quite a long time before we put in place,

[00:09:04] serious management over there.

[00:09:05] Just once it got to a scale that it was just starting to get impractical. Really the story has been very organic. I guess looking back on it, we didn’t have these amazingly thought out plans. We knew exactly what we’re doing, but it was really much like, well, what do we need to do next?

[00:09:17] And what is the next step on the path? What is the next thing we need to do? You know, feel a bit of pain in, I don’t know, support through the US? Oh, well we’ve gotta do something there, we’ve gotta add to it. So it, it was just a very, very incremental, and I think it meant we could grow and grow well.

[00:09:35] We could add people that fit really well. I guess that’s part of the story here is our culture was, has been really great. It felt like a really great place to be. And I think trying to scale that has been a challenge. Particularly through the COVID years.

[00:09:48] It added extra challenge to that. But really making it feel like everybody is a part of this. They’re on the journey. We are here to have fun. And make an impact along the way. That was something that was quite different. And I think being in it I probably couldn’t almost see it myself, but that was always reflected back to us when new people came in.

[00:10:05] It’s like, wow, this place is a bit different.

[00:10:07] Just because we were just two software engineers, who just wanted to have a fun place to work. And we didn’t really have, we had no external shareholders. We sort of could self-fund ourselves. So it just was a different sort of pressure. We could just do it the way we wanted to do it and what felt right.

[00:10:21] we got a long way on that sort of gut instinct of what is right for the business and what is right for the customer and what is right for the people. Is

[00:10:29] Chris Hudson: Is there something about your approach to decision making that you feel has stood the test of time. You know, from right at the beginning it felt instinctive. Obviously you went through the different stages of growth, but do you feel like an approach to decision making was always there and how would you describe that?

[00:10:45] Matt Doran: Often I think for me personally, there’s definitely something about what feels right is sort of a gut feel for me. And I guess for me, I’m quite methodical and systematic, so I do like to think things through and hear all the inputs and listen to people, all those sort of things.

[00:10:58] So and I think that too has held us in good stead. I think as you grow it becomes harder to do that way and that it is difficult. We had a tendency to wanna listen to everybody and get, oh, I have a tendency to listen to everybody and get all the inputs. But that can be a bit overwhelming as well.

[00:11:13] That has been a challenge in our culture ’cause we wanted openness, but sometimes it’s too many voices. It can be hard to sort of distill what is important from that. You can’t please everybody all the time either. So you have to, you make those decisions, balancing all those inputs.

[00:11:28] Chris Hudson: It’s obviously a fine balance. I think either in taking on enough. In the way of listening to other voices or actually only listen to a select few. I mean, there are tons of businesses out there who would run off a small group of advisors and they would hold those, those opinions and points of expertise really dear and close to their hearts because they have a trust of relationship.

[00:11:49] They’d been running for years and years.

[00:11:51] Did you have that kind of infrastructure and framework, or was it all quite organic and almost fluid with the growth of the company?

[00:11:58] Matt Doran: Look, I think we’ve always, we always try to maintain a pretty flat structure. It’s feels like that’s a really important thing to be able to have people feel like they’re heard. And we were always super accessible as the founders. And I think that people really like that.

[00:12:11] So that was always a real part of it. If we talk about culture, that was one of the principles we would put in place. I think one of them, we called it anyone can talk to anybody. It’s like there’s no you know, corner office or something where you can’t go in.

[00:12:23] It’s, you can literally come and come to me, tell me something good, bad, ugly, whatever, come, come and say it. And we would encourage that. So I dunno about frameworks, but that was something that we did and still try to instil throughout.

[00:12:37] As I said it is hard to scale that. And I think that’s where, that’s where small companies have a superpower.

[00:12:43] I think over big companies. It’s like when you’ve got a tight-knit group of people who really understand each other and understand what needs to be done, understand how everything works, you can move very fast. And I think that was one of the things as we got bigger, it felt a lot harder to do that.

[00:12:58] I mean, I’ve never worked in a big business, so I haven’t, I don’t know how they do it. I know you work in those sort of areas and that’s a big challenge. But there’s something special about that sort of size of company. And I think, you know, through that time we got to the 50 that was a challenge.

[00:13:12] 100’s a challenge, it’s hard to maintain that same feel and the same level of performance and all those things that you had when you were small, you felt super efficient and super nimble. But you gotta grow, you gotta scale. But keeping that is a challenge.

[00:13:25] Chris Hudson: Yeah. And had you always set out to scale and go big?

[00:13:29] Matt Doran: I don’t think so. I guess these days you look at everybody’s, venture capital and a big exit and scaling and everybody understands that. But I mean, 20 years ago I didn’t understand it. Maybe some people did and I think as I said, we were very organic and very bottom up.

[00:13:43] When we brought on those us employees who came from other businesses, they were like you could market this like crazy and scale so fast. What are you doing?

[00:13:50] You have an amazing product. And it just wasn’t the way we thought. We were much more the, if you build it, they will come kind of thing.

[00:13:56] We were engineers, built a solid product. And I, I think an interesting sort of part of the story, early days, Chris and myself, the founders, even for a very long time, we’d have pretty much only software developers in the team. We would all do support in the morning.

[00:14:10] We would come in the morning, being in Australia, all the support comes in overnight. We all sit down and do the support for an hour or two.

[00:14:15] And that bred some sort of culture of extremely good customer experience and customer support. And that was something that we still do standby. And it bred this cycle in the product of immediate feedback

[00:14:30] and I’m the developer, I can go fix that now, or that’s a great idea. That was something that was a superpower for the business. And it we kept that for a long time. That was extremely hard to scale. I don’t know that we’ve been able to scale it. But that was definitely something that allowed us to build a product that was fantastic.

[00:14:47] It became such, had such a great fit for the market that we were after in particular, that started in education and then built out to commercial businesses. But it became a product that fit the market so well. It just sold itself. And getting back to your question, we didn’t have this big plan about how we can grow.

[00:15:02] It was very organic. We had a great product, word of mouth, reputation

[00:15:08] amazing customer advocates. All these things you hear about in customer experience now, that came just not through any theorising about customer experience. It just came through giving people, customers great experiences. And we had advocates.

[00:15:19] We’d have people on forums just recommending us or saying, you have to use this product. So that sort of bottom up build it, if you build it, and they will come, worked for us, I guess, in whether we were fortunate or in the right market. Found that little niche, but it, it worked really well and it never was that

[00:15:36] we’re gonna, not for me anyway, we’re gonna take over the world and this is what we’re gonna be. I would’ve never guessed we would’ve had 250 employees ever until it happened.

[00:15:45] Chris Hudson: 250 and then you were, you’re across multiple countries, how many countries?

[00:15:49] Matt Doran: Like we’re sold into, I don’t know what the number is, it’s many, all of the major countries, I would say we’re sold into. Probably something like what 40% of our sales going to North 

America, 40% into Europe and maybe 20% to Australia.

[00:16:03] Largely through resellers. So it’s, it’s not a direct to consumer model.

[00:16:07] We’ve been fortunate to find a very powerful sales force, which we didn’t have to have ourselves. So we are really a channel sold product. But yeah, sold all throughout the world and Australia’s a long way away from most of our market, and it was always very humbling to go over to the US and just see how well known and well loved your product is. Australia’s a long way, way, both in time and distance, and sometimes it’s hard to, hard to feel, be immersed in the market from the distance over here sometimes.

[00:16:34] So another part of the challenge.

[00:16:36] Chris Hudson: Are you missing the travel?

[00:16:37] Matt Doran: No, no I was never the big traveler, so I was mainly the, you know, in our head office building the product and handling operation. Chris was the, he would often, although he’s an engineer as well, he was more the get out and sell the product and visit all of the market and channel. So I stayed away from most of that.

[00:16:56] Chris Hudson: Was there a step in that process and, and in the culture building sense, was there something that, plugged your, your HQ into the way in which it was being received? Other than the thing every morning, if it was being showcased around the world and Chris would go out and do that, was there a kind of feedback loop there as well that that would allow people to get across how the product was being seen or received in its later days?

[00:17:17] Matt Doran: We always had a really big support team and that was probably our real big interface. Comparatively to most software companies, it’s quite a big support team. It’s like that we pride ourselves on being able to like really support the customers. So that is our, touchstone.

[00:17:32] We would often at our global all hands meetings, we would be trying to bring back customer stories and things into the business. ’cause it is sometimes quite hard to get them, you know, the development teams who are dedicated to the product and building.

[00:17:46] Most of them are in a, well, all of them are pretty much in Australia and sometimes it’s hard for them to get the real sense of, sense of the market, sense of the product, sense of the customers in that distance and customer stories is one way we’ve 

done that. And trying to bring that back in. Getting them to go out and do tours as well with customers can help as well. We’ve had some amazing customers over the years.

[00:18:07] Early on we thought the big universities like the Cambridges and the Harvards of the world running our software was really big.

[00:18:14] And that was always very sort of proud and that would make everybody feel like we are really legit. In the last couple of years we got Google as a customer, which as software geeks, that sort of feels like a bit like the pinnacle if you’ve, you can imagine the, the sort of rigour that would be required to get a bit of enterprise software into Google when they’re all

[00:18:34] amazing software engineers and probably pretty critical of security and many, many other things.

[00:18:40] That was like an amazing team effort. Like it took a long time. But it’s a very proud sort of badge to have. And they even put up a video. We’ve got a video testimonial out somewhere, so they, they’re willing, willing to get up and say how we work well with ’em and stuff.

[00:18:54] It’s a really proud moment for me and the team.

[00:18:57] Chris Hudson: Oh, that is amazing. I mean, what a, what a accolade and what a piece of recognition to get back from, as you say, the biggest software development company in the world. I think, are they, are they, are

[00:19:08] Matt Doran: They’re, they’re up there anyway.

[00:19:09] Chris Hudson: They’re up there, they’d be up there, wouldn’t they?

[00:19:11] Yeah. And I mean, this is, this is amazing story because not only in the success that you’ve seen, but, in the fact that you and Chris and the team, by the sounds of it, a lot of you stayed through that process and you were building the company over all those years. What was, if I can ask you about yourself, what was driving you personally during that time to keep going, to keep trying things out?

[00:19:33] What was driving you?

[00:19:34] Matt Doran: Mm. I like solving problems. I guess that’s one thing that I would always continue to love to do. I think I probably like solving technical problems more than, you know, operating a business. I’m very much a software engineering sort of geek at heart.

[00:19:49] So I loved continuing to be pretty hands-on. I wouldn’t be sort of probably day-to-day writing

[00:19:56] code in terms of features and stuff, but I would be definitely in there when big customer’s shoes would come up and I’d be in there with everybody trying to help out and really just show that I’m just the same as everybody else in the team and I’m gonna help out.

[00:20:10] So a lot of that was motivation comes from working with great people solving problems. it’s not very fun working with not good people. If you, you can have fun with people while you’re working hard, I think that goes a long way.

[00:20:23] One memory I have- we build software that runs on the photocopiers, which is sort of, they’re not the best platforms to build software on.

[00:20:30] They’re pretty hard and they’re kind of closed ecosystems, you have to get permission and certification. And me and one of the engineers went over to Konica Minolta it was a really, really hard week. They had to test it. If they found bugs, we had to turn them around.

[00:20:45] We visited Connecticut, we were over there. We had like four days and it was like one of the hardest weeks I’d ever had. But it was the funnest, one of the funnest and most memorable experience I ever had because we were just solving problems, working closely together. And it, it’s just one of [00:21:00] my most favorite memories.

[00:21:01] And I’ll never forget it.

[00:21:02] Chris Hudson: I was gonna ask you about your superpower, but I think you’ve answered the question already. Do you wanna build on that in any way?

[00:21:07] Matt Doran: Yeah, I think probably in that problem solving areas probably. One that I do think is a bit of my superpower I think it’s, our software’s quite complicated. We interact with many devices in complicated environments. One example was WeWork, which is, very big office space company.

[00:21:26] And just when you get a problem, there’s a tendency to sort of look for the problem elsewhere. Like it’s probably the customers problem. They’ve done something wrong or their network’s wrong or whatever.

[00:21:35] But really just always stepping back and being really honest and methodical about analysing problems and liaising with the customer through that process and saying, look, if you work with us, we will find the problem. So that, that was what became one of my super powers. I could,

[00:21:52] even in the worst sort of customer issues where there’s systems down and they’re in some ways screaming at you.

[00:21:59] [00:22:00] I got very good at being able to say, look, trust me and work with me and with our team. We will get there. We will find the issue if you trust us and allow us to install patches and get data from you. So that became, and that it’s amazing those sort of things that feel like a crisis at the time.

[00:22:18] Like a massive customer who’s saying we’re gonna uninstall your software or whatever. Those sort of things where you think, and the, the reseller is screaming at you and the salespeople, everybody’s screaming in those moments where you can solve the issue in a calm and methodical way.

[00:22:33] You get to the end of it as much as it’s painful, have won all of those people’s sort of admiration and respect, even though they’re extremely stressful at the time, if you do it well and you know, you don’t want those things to happen, but they happen. And if you can, I think that sort of, I have a calm approach to that and I think I would tend to calm down everybody around me by just sort of saying let’s just figure this out.

[00:22:56] Yeah,

[00:22:56] Chris Hudson: wow. The problem’s always gonna be there in this world, in this industry. It sounds like you had a good approach to that. Was it always there? Is it something that you taught yourself and consciously learned, or do you feel like at the start of your career it was like, impossible?

[00:23:10] It’s nothing and I’m the sensei and I can do whatever I like, ’cause I can fix anything. Just show me the problem and I’ll fix it. But did you, did you notice at some point more, in terms of your self-awareness, did you notice at some point that you were more well equipped for problem solving than you were before?

[00:23:25] Or was it always the case?

[00:23:26] Matt Doran: It’s definitely learned. I mean it’s a bit nature and a bit nurture, I think probably is the reality. I think I tend to be quite a methodical thinker and try to eliminate problems, break things down and eliminate thing, problem, break ’em down. But equally you can’t just do that straight away.

[00:23:41] So I remember the early consulting software, consulting,

[00:23:45] that industry hire graduates, throw them in the deep end and figure it out. That was a bit of a baptism of fire that didn’t help, you know, that helped as well. I think engineering degrees as well also helped, like, I didn’t come through pure

[00:23:59] [00:24:00] software engineering or those things, which I dunno, engineering is a really hard degree and I think it really gets you in a problem solving mindset. So it probably started there. But yeah, it continues today. I think I love to solve problems, not just in work environment everywhere.

[00:24:17] It’s definitely sort of a part of my identity. I think solving a tricky problem.

[00:24:20] Chris Hudson: It’s interesting ’cause you come at it from an engineering point of view, which I guess people would have preconceptions about. In my line of work, it’s all about human sense design and, you know, we’re often looking primarily to the people that are gonna be using something to be able to understand whether it’s gonna be valued or what their pain points are.

[00:24:39] Reframing the problem is always part of that, but is there approach that you, you would recommend, standby, in breaking down a problem or what to go to first? Or do you feel, do you feel that it’s instinctive?

[00:24:51] Matt Doran: I think we do as humans, have a tendency to jump to conclusions and have confirmation bias a lot of the time. And really rely on things from our past.

[00:25:03] Our past is can be good, but it can also lead us astray as well. So I think that mindset, that engineering mindset is, I think really being open-minded and very honest about

[00:25:17] owning the problem as well. Like not trying to deflect it. Like, you know, say this, assuming it’s my problem, that’s a good place for a software company to start rather than assuming it’s somebody else’s problem.

[00:25:26] And one of the techniques in engineering is sort of five why’s, not just looking at the surface, why did this problem happen? Go into that, so then why did that happen? And trying to go back to the root as well, so that you don’t just put a bandaid on, but you actually solve the problem.

[00:25:42] It’s a good thing to do with a team as well, to get other ideas. When there’s something that’s really gnarly and you’re looking for something deeper, something deeper, my mind is going to technical problems, which sometimes are quite hard to get a pinpoint on. So you need to really think hard about it sometimes.

[00:25:59] Chris Hudson: What, what kind of technical problem? Just to explain what, what would that kind of problem be?

[00:26:03] Matt Doran: I mean, the ones that often come to mind are scaling problems with software. You know, when we have, these days maybe it’s a bit different with cloud software’s architected it in a bit different way than on-premise software. We had on-premise software. We now building cloud-based software, which is completely learn from 20 years of experience and building public cloud infrastructure.

[00:26:22] But a lot of those early problems were building enterprise software. You’ve got like a server running something and if you’ve got a Google or a big company with many devices, you enter a new environment and there’s some variable that you hadn’t planned for that is different. Maybe it’s,

[00:26:37] many more users or a weird combination of devices or there’s some parameter that is different than what you expected.

[00:26:43] And unlike maybe cloud infrastructure where you are running the operation and you have the sort of DevOps and you have the visibility of everything on these massive corporate environments, you get a report and you know what sort of customer reports are like, they can be very vague.

[00:27:00] You know, the system stopped working or something, and you have to remotely or through intermediaries try to diagnose a really technically technical scaling problem.

[00:27:11] That’s an example. You have to do it through often collecting a lot of remote data from customers and handing files back and forth and those sort of things, it becomes like looking for a needle in a haystack.

[00:27:22] Chris Hudson: Yeah, sounds good. I don’t envy you. I mean, yeah, I’m still, things are spinning in my head. I’m still wondering about imposter syndrome and when or whether that did not or did kick in for you at any point, or whether you thought, I’m just gonna have a go at this problem because I need to fix it. Sounds like you’re very determined.

[00:27:39] Matt Doran: Well I think that’s on the technical one. It’s a much more comfortable environment, I guess, when you get into leading a company when you’ve, you’ve never been a, you know, a leader in a company before. We were just lowly employees who built a company and learned everything on the way.

[00:27:54] So there’s definitely more imposter syndrome in that respect, and you just never, you never can know enough. And hiring new people with different expertise that you can rely on or. Looking for an external coach or something that can give you some, some extra perspective that you didn’t have. And that has been another journey.

[00:28:15] I think that’s probably my biggest personal learning would’ve been much more self-awareness and understanding myself more.

[00:28:24] I think that is something that I don’t think can be underestimated as a leader in a business. The sort of understanding those subconscious things that we do or the way that we, we interact with people or avoid some things or all those sort of quirks of our psychology and being and trying to understand ourselves and be aware of our weaknesses or aware of our fears and those things, and really trying to understand them and live with them or come to terms with ’em. I think that that is a, a sort of a thing that I think is one of my 

biggest learnings. It’s probably only come in the last five years more than anything.

[00:29:05] Chris Hudson: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, people definitely say that you can’t teach management. In a way you have to experience it and obviously you can look at the theory, but actually it’s very much a case of getting in and doing it. Did you find your own way with that? And did you find out about yourself through doing that yourself?

[00:29:24] Matt Doran: No, I did it with other people reflecting it back at me. I’m becoming more reflective, but I don’t think I was at all, I think a lot of these things I didn’t understand much about myself, and I think it took some very trusted coaches really to ask me good questions or point out, observe things and behaviours in myself that they felt that I wasn’t even aware of.

[00:29:44] As an example, like self-confidence or in myself, I am, I’m a worrier. I get anxious. So like, I’m, am I doing the right thing? You know, is this the right thing to do for the people or the right decision to make? And I can get in my head a lot. And I didn’t realise how much of [00:30:00] that would come outta my mouth.

[00:30:01] It sounds very genuine. But having that pointed out to you and, and reflecting on that allows you to, to improve yourself and be more aware of it and say, what is going on there? And how can I improve myself? So having a trusted coach has been amazing because I guess as a leader, you don’t,

[00:30:15] going to psych safety and those sort of things, people don’t often, they’re not gonna really point out some of your weaknesses. It’s something that could be quite a brave move for people to do in an organisation.

[00:30:24] Chris Hudson: Where do you go for one of those? It’s hard to find the right match, isn’t it? And to get to the point where you think like you need one. When would that happen for anybody?

[00:30:31] Matt Doran: Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing when you look back at the big turning points in a business often, I don’t think we knew. I can’t explain how they happened. They happened by fate I dunno. Maybe just at the right time. Things like example of I mean the coach I’m thinking of, we were doing an executive hiring process and

[00:30:50] we hired our first round of execs when we were 20 odd people, and they grew with us a long way. And then when we had to hire again, we were much bigger and it felt like a much bigger deal and much more I don’t know, a harder thing. And at that point, the recruiter brought in somebody who was to help with the onboarding, the sort of the integration, and she ended up being a great coach.

[00:31:11] So we sort of found each other. We didn’t go looking. So you know, but there have been others.

[00:31:16] Chris Hudson: Do you believe in that? Do you believe in putting things out into the universe and then them coming back in one way or another? Things come at the right time and, you know, serendipity. You mentioned that, but do you, do you feel that happens?

[00:31:27] Matt Doran: It does happen. I’m not very woo woo or not very in that mindset, but it does seem to happen. It’s a bit hard to explain, but I guess if you’re trying your best and putting it out there. Maybe the things come, come to you. An example that comes to mind for me. There’s things you learn, which you think early on you think, oh that’s big company sort of crap.

[00:31:45] And over time you learn some of that stuff’s really important. Probably one of the first ones for us. We did a branding exercise and

[00:31:51] Chris Hudson: How was that?

[00:31:52] Matt Doran: it was amazing in the end, but I think that was our marketing person at the time. She said we should do it. You know, we had a very basic brand.

[00:32:00] This was probably, I don’t know, five, eight years in. We had probably 30, 40 people. And we did this branding exercise and not only did we end up with an amazing brand, which is on our website today and it really captured the quirkiness and the casual

[00:32:16] sort of nature of the way we interacted with our customers, but it actually helped us identify who we were as a business and articulate our personality and our values which we’d never done before.

[00:32:28] It felt different from there. I don’t think it was a very long process, but over the course of weeks and interviews and brainstorming our values and who we are they are still today, the four values that came out are still talked about.

[00:32:41] It became not only our brand, but it became our identity,

[00:32:45] like really our identity. I mean, it sounds obvious as a brand is your identity, but I mean, like our identity, our internal identity, our values, who we are, how we act. And probably before that I would’ve thought branding, you know, who cares but I was completely naive to that and it was a sort of an amazing experience looking back on it.

[00:33:02] Chris Hudson: So you went in with open eyes, you were all quite curious to see what would happen.

[00:33:06] What’s your attitude towards failure? Or experimentation or risk, if I can ask.

[00:33:14] Matt Doran: I think I, I personally struggle with failure, maybe like we all do. I’m scared of failure like everybody else, but I know that’s not what we want in our cultures. We don’t wanna blame people for mistakes.

[00:33:25] We wanna allow people to learn. And that’s what we all do. And I think that is something that I started off in being a techie, but I’m now a board member. I’m less operational in the business, but my last role in the business was like Head of People which is very different again.

[00:33:40] I would’ve never, ever picked myself as being that if I look back at the start of my career, but,

[00:33:46] it got to a point where I was like, that is the most important thing. And really thinking about you know, what makes people tick and how to make them supported and all those things became the most important thing.

[00:33:57] The psych safety thing. That became like a big thing that I was, I got very interested in. I know like the studies show that it’s a big factor in performance.

[00:34:06] And you can sort of see, thinking back on the business when we were smaller, and we nurtured that anyone can talk to anyone. Everybody knows everyone. You’re very close knit and it is really safe and it’s just harder to scale that when there’s distance between people.

[00:34:23] I think the sort of gut instinct when you hear psych safety, it’s like, oh, well is it okay to give somebody some harsh feedback, my boss?

[00:34:30] Or something like that? But it’s so much more than that. That’s one element of it that we always, that wasn’t a problem, but it’s are my opinions heard? Do I feel like I I know what I need to do and, and I know where I fit into the big picture and do I feel like I belong?

[00:34:49] All these sort of things, factors that go into it. It’s not purely about do I feel safe to say something to my boss?

[00:34:54] That is something that again, came naturally when you are one smallish team and it gets harder and harder to scale up when there’s layers of teams and managers and other things in between you and everybody else.

[00:35:06] Chris Hudson: Did you feel consciously that there was a point where you were almost needing to take, more responsibility of other people than for yourself and your own actions? Did that happen at any point in your journey?

[00:35:16] Matt Doran: Hmm. It was definitely a transition point where it went from being obvious what needed to be done to once it gets too big that you can’t know everybody and sort of be across everything. And I think that was some of our challenge, I think having grown up in the way we did self-funded, very organic.

[00:35:37] Switching from a and very kind of reactive. Reactive can be used in a bad sense, but reactive in a good way. Where

[00:35:43] you are really close to what needs to be done, what the customer needs, and you adapt fast to a business where you, I think there’s still, in our DNA, we want to do that. We want to be that, but you can’t get 200 people being super reactive because they’re like, I thought we were going this direction and they told me to go that direction, and I haven’t even finished where I was going.

[00:36:04] That real balance of being nimble, but giving people enough sort of direction and

[00:36:10] balancing that nimbleness versus direction and planning is a big challenge. And I think for us, coming from the very nimble side, we probably have the opposite of what I can imagine in big corporates where we are like too nimble and people get frustrated ’cause we are moving, changing our minds too often.

[00:36:28] And I think that was became a discipline which is to like, okay, we’ve got a plan. It’s right, stick to it. Don’t, don’t change it and try to get everybody lined up behind it. That is something that we’ve had to learn and we’re still learning and getting better at.

[00:36:40] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Talking about plan or strategy, what are the things that you think work well in anchoring the direction of the company? What can people get behind? You’ve talked about branding, but what else do you think stands out as something that was really worth doing?

[00:36:54] Matt Doran: Look, I think one thing we have done well and people resonate with is having a purpose that people can line behind [00:37:00] and for us, yeah, we’re in print management. Chris, my business partner likes to say we are the coolest company in the most boring part of tech or something like people are like, printers?

[00:37:08] Like really. So yeah, we are like a fun company in this weirdly boring place. Like how, how can you inspire people to come and work for a printer management company? But, we ended up doing it.

[00:37:20] There was purpose. So we would, we were very early into the sort of environment waste and environmental angle was like, as I said at the beginning, our initial idea was stop wasting paper at the printer which now translates to wasting energy and all the other things that go along with it.

[00:37:36] At one point it was just a little idea, it was a feature, tracking how much environmental impact the product made, but it became a part of our identity. It became part of our purpose that if we could in through the software encourage more responsible printing and less waste, then we are having an impact.

[00:37:54] And we have millions of end users customers using the software. And if we save an X percent of what they print, it makes a big difference. We continually would hear stories where like, universities would install the software and their printing budgets are unbelievable. We would hear stories where they’ve reduced their printing by half or quarter and it’s thousands and thousands and thousands of reams or tons of paper,

[00:38:20] so that ended up becoming a purpose to some degree.

[00:38:23] It’s just, you know, what can we do to, in our little part of the world, our little niche, make an impact? And that was counter to the whole industry, which is selling office equipment, which makes their money on people printing more pages. That is their business model. So we were kind of a disruptor in the fact that our software kind of goes against their business model, but

[00:38:45] people wanted the software, particularly in education, where it was like a real strong need. so that, became a purpose for people. I think that’s a starting point and for a lot of time where we struggled to articulate a strategy, learning how to do a, to have a strategy and have a plan.

[00:38:57] We tried various things and getting better at it and articulating better, but that underlying purpose along with sort of a fun culture, took us a long way,

[00:39:08] Chris Hudson: This is a golden question, but how far in advance do you think you can plan for your corporate direction and strategy and set a plan meaningfully?

[00:39:18] Matt Doran: I admire people who are great leaders who are planners. It’s not sort of in my nature, I’m probably more the fly by the seat of the pants a little bit, but in the most recent iteration over the last few years, we’ve did these very, we had strategy consultants come in.

[00:39:31] We tried a few in the past, we tried various things, but we did a 5, 3, 2, 1 kind of plan. It’s probably very common, but that worked pretty well. It was really well received.

[00:39:41] Even though it’s hard and you don’t have, you can’t have all the answers. It was very well received. Just to be able to sort of set like in five years we can be this, like we don’t quite know how we’re gonna get there.

[00:39:50] And then trying to work back and put in a few pieces, we’re in the middle of that.

[00:39:54] We’re up to year two or three now in that. But I mean, that very simple framework that was our best attempt at it, to try and think about it that way. Just like make the five years something that’s feels a bit of a stretch and see how we can get there.

[00:40:09] Chris Hudson: And how do you think businesses can almost translate that level of artefact into something that’s meaningful for people on the ground to be able to use and understand and work with? Do you have any stories along those lines or evidence of that working?

[00:40:23] Matt Doran: I think it was very well received for us to be able to articulate where we wanted to be in the future. I think even alone, that makes people feel like, okay, it, it’s hard to align a group of people in the same direction. At least people can go like, hmm I don’t know.

[00:40:36] That sounds ambitious. I’m not sure I believe it, but, ooh it sounds a bit interesting and it sounds about right. And I think that alone makes people feel a confidence or something they feel something that they

[00:40:47] want to give it a go. And then working back, I guess and going, okay, if we’re gonna do that, we need to do this by three years.

[00:40:54] We need to do this by two. And then the one year it was quite a helpful exercise. I think in the end we will, the first year we did that, we had so much on that list too much, way too much. That has been a bit of a fault for of ours as well, sort of with a business that’s got a lot of customers and a lot of day-to-day trying to figure out how to do the strategic stuff.

[00:41:12] The right balance of push and reality when there’s a day-to-day to deal with as well has been a challenge for us as well. There was a bit of a tendency to do too much. So I dunno, to get back to your question, I don’t think you’re gonna have all the answers. You know, ultimately you need a business who can mostly drive itself. People need to have some self-direction and if you can point ’em in the right direction, that’s a pretty good start.

[00:41:33] I think that balance of sort of accountability versus autonomy is a really tough kind of one to figure out, and I don’t claim to know all, have the answers there.

[00:41:45] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Fair enough. No, that’s good. I mean, there are different schools of thought around innovation. Obviously sometimes it’s very well and methodically planned out. Sometimes it’s a bit more a coincidence in and around, incremental innovation or something that would happen out of, or is born out of business as usual, born out of the day-to-day because somebody takes the initiative

[00:42:04] and because they know roughly where the company is going, they can just jump in and try something.

[00:42:08] But in other cases, it takes a massive shift or a catalyst or a big initiative. Or a consultancy or whoever it is to come in and actually

[00:42:16] set a new vision, set a new direction, get people trying and experimenting with new things. Did you find in any of those areas that there was, either a lean towards, maybe more around the BAU and and kind of servicing ideas around progress from within or that you needed to have external forces and trends and other things that would spark some of those ideas?

[00:42:36] Matt Doran: I lean more towards the innovation is, it’s not a magical thing. It comes through people being close to the problem knowing the problem, well, listening to the customers and you know, if you’re paying attention, those ideas will come up. I think I’m more of that mindset. I understand the other as well because we’ve also realised that we want to diversify and then coming up with

[00:43:02] more greenfield sort of out there adjacencies.

[00:43:07] That is a much much harder problem, much more uncertainty, by its nature it’s not what you know, so it’s much harder to go into. So, I mean, there’s, there’s so much innovation possibilities within the stuff you know, and the day-to-day if you are listening and paying attention.

[00:43:21] And I think that to me is where

[00:43:23] you’re most likely to be successful and you’re most likely to be fruitful. It’s the whole blue sky thing is like, I’m competing with every other blue sky kind of thing. What is your competitive advantage gonna be over there that’s gonna really make you win?

[00:43:37] So I think that is amazingly difficult. It’s something we are thinking about to say, well, where do we go? Where do we go to next? But it feels like the best bang for buck is gonna be innovate close to where you are now.

[00:43:49] Chris Hudson: Yeah, well it got you through the doors of Google. I think something was working. Maybe that was from one of your Blue Sky plans at one stage to get onto the Google books. But that’s amazing. I mean, what a story and just thinking back, what are some of the big learnings that jump out, either from key moments or what are some of the big things that you think are, those are points at which we’ve really learned something big?

[00:44:07] Matt Doran: Mm. I’ve mentioned the branding one. I think that’s important, like defining who you are as a business and your sort of values. That sounded like a very fluffy thing when I was beginning out. Values, what, why would we, you know, what does that mean? But I think it is really important.

[00:44:23] It does drive the people you attract and the way you work together. I think that is a really very strong, really important thing. We would use that in our onboarding process and we’d have a whole slide deck around values and principles,

[00:44:36] things that would get people to sort of understand who we are quickly.

[00:44:39] Think it’s very well understood now, but for me it was a massive learning. Simplicity and, and clarity of direction as well. Like I think things, businesses get really complicated. Everything gets really complicated. Over time you add things, processes get more complicated.

[00:44:56] Everything’s getting more like looking for simplicity everywhereb I think that will get you a long way. And the importance of people like in a business like ours

[00:45:06] it’s everything. So strong focus on growing your people and making sure they feel like they have the sort of right balance of autonomy and guidance and direction is just so important.

[00:45:17] It’s such a competitive world, not only for people, but for products and everything, I guess where it begins and ends really to a degree.

[00:45:24] Chris Hudson: On the people point, what were some of the secrets around getting people on board with culture that you created?

[00:45:31] Matt Doran: One of the things we would always say is, we just wanted to create a place where we would wanna work ourselves. And that probably held us in good stead for a long time. And I think we were lucky because we’ve been successful.

[00:45:41] Organic growth, always profitable. Always growing. It meant we didn’t have some pressures that other companies would have at times where we could, we could do things that would

[00:45:49] maybe be a bit luxurious. Maybe they are not typical. I think that would be one thing. We are not typical. People are always like, hmm that’s strange, but it’s like, hmm, I don’t know. It worked for us. And, and that sort of quirkiness and friendliness and ultimately it was a part of our values, that we just wanted to be enjoying the ride as well. It wasn’t about making money or paying investors back or getting a big exit or whatever. Part of it is just about having a sustainable, fun journey.

[00:46:17] And we took that philosophy. I mean, that’s probably worth talking about as well. It’s not just internal to us. We had a huge partner network of distributors that almost became a part of our organisation. Their branding looks like our branding, and it came through treating them like with respect.

[00:46:33] Not just like, somebody’s gonna sell your software, but like, true partners.

[00:46:36] That just came from this instinct of like doing right by people and very basic stuff. But I don’t know if that was only possible because we had this sort of luxury of there wasn’t this pressure to always squeeze the last dollar or whatever it is.

[00:46:50] It’s an amazing ride. You know, just laying it out to you today. It’s good to do because I don’t often reflect on it.

[00:46:55] Chris Hudson: How does it feel reliving it through the stories you’ve been telling in this podcast?

[00:46:59] Matt Doran: Yeah, it’s still a bit unbelievable to me. I think I still am always a bit surprised at where it ended up. Very proud of it, very proud of the people in the business who’ve

[00:47:11] been through the journey. It was never intended to be this big. That’s just where it went. So but yeah, it’s always very proud to reflect back on it and I think it’s sometimes hard to sort of see it yourself. You’re so in it and there’s always the problems and the stress. There’s lots of stuff going on. It’s often hard. It’s often takes somebody from the outside who comes in who can reflect it back at you to really appreciate it sometimes.

[00:47:35] So, and that those, some of those moments are, are where it really hits you.

[00:47:39] Chris Hudson: Absolutely right. Even just hearing it, everyone’s gotta be in awe of that story and, and what you were able to achieve not only just individually, but as a team across all of those countries and with the partners that you were able to set up. I mean, it’s just an incredible story.

[00:47:53] So thank you very much for sharing it.

[00:47:55] Matt Doran: No worries.

[00:47:55] Chris Hudson: And I wanted to finish just by, it’s usually one question about the show. The show is always about how people can most effectively make change possible within their business in one way or another. From an entrepreneur’s standpoint you’ve been both an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur, obviously, in the time that you’ve been with PaperCut.

[00:48:14] What would your advice be to an entrepreneur starting with that? For somebody who’s starting out today and would have dreams and aspirations, what would your advice be to them?

[00:48:24] Matt Doran: I think give it a go. I think that’s the thing. I think in my nature I’m quite nervous to give things a go. I think I remember back to the point where I got the phone call from Chris to say, do you wanna join me? Leave your safe, successful job and go into this thing. And I think it was my Dad who ended up convincing me.

[00:48:43] He was entrepreneurial as well. So it’s probably a little bit in my blood. But yeah, give it a go. Give it your best. Be really open-minded. I think that self-awareness I think I see sometimes I see people who can get a bit stuck in their opinions. In that early stage of starting something up, you have to be open to you yourself being wrong, your assumptions being wrong, and like being able to be really open and really listening to what is happening to you, to your product and your market.

[00:49:10] And that is hard because we can get really attached to our ideas, but you need to be really open to change. And I think the best I’m thinking, I guess, of product sort of entrepreneurs, I think the best product people, those people who can hold those ideas lightly and be, and really listen and adapt.

[00:49:26] And that’s really important early on.

[00:49:29] Chris Hudson: Would there be anything else that you’d say to intrapreneurs to the same question really? Would you feel that people within a bigger organisation would benefit from the same advice or would you say something different?

[00:49:40] Matt Doran: I suspect those intrapreneurs are probably the ones that are the ones who feel like they’re the open-minded ones and maybe everybody else in the organisation isn’t. So trying to engender that that openness is a challenge for them.

[00:49:50] I feel like being brave and being able to, because I, I suspect and I have not lived this experience. But you have to be, I can imagine you have to be quite brave and also have a self-awareness

[00:50:00] to be able to deal with all that feedback that would come when you’re trying to challenge ideas and challenge the status quo and be able to sort of be calm and reason through that.

[00:50:09] So probably something about that being that thinking about working on you and you are being self-reflective and brave and being willing to step into it. I guess it’s obviously a risky, it can be quite a risky thing, being an entrepreneur. An intrapreneur I could imagine in some organisations.

[00:50:22] Maybe it’s just the way that it translates. It’s risky to be an entrepreneur ’cause maybe it’s your money or your house on the line. And it’s risky intrapreneur because you kinda gotta put yourself out there.

[00:50:34] Chris Hudson: And your money and your house is on the line because if you don’t have your job, you don’t have that either.

[00:50:38] Matt Doran: That’s true.

[00:50:39] It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing.

[00:50:40] Chris Hudson: yeah.

[00:50:41] Matt Doran: Yeah.

[00:50:42] Chris Hudson: Ah, brilliant. Well thanks so much for the chat, Matt. Really enjoyed it this evening. You’ve just given us such a, such an inspirational story. To take so much from.

[00:50:49] So thank you. Thank you very much. I usually finish the show just by asking the guests if they would like to share any, any contact details about themselves. If people wanna get in touch, ask you a question after hearing the story, maybe they wanna get in touch and, and say hello or something. Would you want to share anything there?

[00:51:04] Matt Doran: My LinkedIn profile, they could ping me through there. There’s a lot of noise on those LinkedIn profiles, but I’ll try to find the the signal in the noise.

[00:51:12] Chris Hudson: Very good. Alright, well thank you so much again, Matt, and appreciate your time. Thank you.

[00:51:16] Matt Doran: No worries. Thanks Chris. It was great.

[00:51:19] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.

[00:51:32] After all, we’re trying to help you, the intrapreneurs kick more goals within your organisations. If you have any questions about the things we covered in the show, please email me directly at chris@companyroad.co. I answer all messages so please don’t hesitate to reach out. And to hear about the latest episodes and updates

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