At the tender age of 28, Orcon's CEO no longer feels the need to prove himself to his peers, writes Ashley Campbell
Outside the office young men, obviously dressed for a day at the skate park, are fooling around with a skateboard, while a couple of similarly casual guys are cooking sausages on a barbecue.
Inside the foyer the CEO, looking not a day over 30 and dressed in jeans, black shirt
and Lacoste trainers, is chatting at the receptionist's desk. He takes you through funky, inflatable corridors that belong in a 60s sci-fi movie set to his office, which he later says "looks like a bloody apartment building".
As in any high-end apartment, a large flat-screen TV is playing - albeit promotional brand-building clips - there's a stunning view over the harbour towards the city skyline and a magnum of Deutz on the side cabinet.
Welcome to Orcon.
CEO Scott Bartlett is the boy wonder of New Zealand telecos. The reason he looks not a day over 30 is that he's 28. He's been CEO since July 2007, when Orcon was bought by Kordia, and was effectively running the business for 18 months before that.
Youth has its advantages - but in the ultra-competitive world of telecoms, being taken seriously by the market isn't one of them. When asked how Bartlett is perceived in the industry commentators use words such as "naive" and "lightweight".
Bartlett is all too aware that his age frequently counts against him in the perception stakes.
"It's a real issue, it's not one that can just be dismissed lightly, because experience is important," he says as he talks about applying for his job after the sale. "I always thought I wasn't going to be part of that process, but I asked them to at least give me the benefit of an interview."
The next day, he got the job.
"It was incredibly unlikely. It was almost ridiculous ... It's a big company, it's public money and investment that's gone into this.
"As in everything in business it revolves around confidence. And it always starts with the CEO - confidence in that person's ability and their credentials and their ability to execute and understand risk, understanding how to set a strategy, and understanding how to be driven by the numbers towards performance ... but I got the job, I like to think because I showed an understanding of those issues."
He has, he says, finally figured out how to deal with those who initially dismiss him as too young to take seriously. "I always have the burden of proving myself, because I don't necessarily get the benefit of the doubt that an older person would, but to be honest I focus less on that now than I used to because I found it was a little bit unhealthy. I don't actually have to prove myself all the time to everyone, I just need to do."
And he has done. When Orcon was sold, it had 70 staff - it now has 170. It's transformed from being an ISP to a broad-based telecoms provider, with more to come.
Becoming CEO of what is, by New Zealand standards, a relatively large company while just 27 could be construed as precocious. But when it comes to business, Bartlett has always been precocious.
"Even when I was really young I was always the kid that bagged the feijoas and the plums from the tree out the back and took them out the front and sold them.
"And I did have a life, I promise you," he says, realising it's just a bit unusual, "but I used to sit down when I was like 10 years old with Mum, and we used to add up what the revenues were today and see if we could do better tomorrow. I used to actually talk with Mum about what's the best way to get the sales up.
"It was definitely there from a very early age that I was numbers-focused, I enjoyed setting myself goals and benchmarking and that sort of thing. I tried to take that sort of approach on to the sports field and it didn't turn out so well - some people are natural sportspeople and some people aren't. Applying it to business just seemed like the natural conclusion."
His business focus took him from secondary school in Havelock North to what was meant to be a one-year business course at Oxford University. But the jump from small-town New Zealand to old-school England was too much, and he dropped out.
Bartlett returned to New Zealand to do a commerce degree at Waikato University. But first, he had to raise some money, as his parents were determined he would pay his own way.
So he got what he says was probably his "hardest job ever", selling a cleaning product door to door. "I've always said, if you can sell cleaning products door to door you can bloody well sell anything. And it was tough, but I'm really glad that I did it.
"I made a lot of money. It took me a very long time to earn that much money ever again. I was 18 and I was earning $1000 a week. "
He also worked his way through university, spending three years in retail in Hamilton, for Os and Shirley Harrington in their eponymous menswear store.
"It was a very good relationship and I still talk to them to this day - it was fantastic. Os used to let me run the shop, I was doing the books for him ... helping him out with all this sort of stuff and doing the merchandising ... and the last year I was there they let me do the purchasing. It was great."
It was also a great education in the basics of business, he says. "If you focus just on what I've got to buy, or on how I can cut costs or get that accounting treatment right or the GST - they're all important, but if you don't have a really deep understanding of what customers are looking for ... then you can't make right decisions.
"Every business starts with selling something and the closer you can align what you are selling with what customers want, and the better you can differentiate yourself from your competitors - through whatever mechanism you have - if you focus on those two you are bound to be successful. Everything else is process."
Bartlett has taken that philosophy with him through his post-university career, first in a small web hosting company called New Zealand Revolution, which merged with Quik, a small ISP. When Quik was sold to ihug, and the only job on offer was Perth - which he obviously considers to be the end of the Earth - he started looking around for something else.
It so happened that Orcon co-founder Seeby Woodhouse was looking for "more management capability", and decided Bartlett's experience fitted the bill. Initially hired on a short-term contract, Bartlett soon became a fixture, even being made a minor shareholder before the sale to Kordia.
His greatest strength, says Woodhouse, is his ability to see the whole picture. "Often employees who get promoted to management positions might have a filter that affects their judgment in the business. For example, a finance-focused manager may work the numbers at the expense of staff morale. Scott generally looks at all the data, and then makes the correct decision about what to do."
And he wants to keep making those decisions. When asked what the future holds, Bartlett remains firmly focused on Orcon and his obvious enthusiasm about its - and his - prospects.
"We are already the best of a bad bunch, but that's not actually hard to achieve. So how about we take it to another level where they can never touch us? How about we start to get that return on investment for the shareholder that is above and beyond the expectations they laid out for us originally? How about we really start to find a life after broadband?
"Maybe there's other new business opportunities we can exploit that leverage our experience on the internet. I don't have answers yet so I've got to find them, and that's going to take me the next couple of years at least."
Ashley Campbell is a freelance writer. You can contact her at www.howgood.co.nz/profiles/95
