The secret of my success – Gareth Davies – Frog
We ask Gareth Davies, managing director of schools learning platform solutions company Frog, to divulge the secret of his success.
VitAL: Name, company and job title please? Married? Kids?
Gareth Davies: Gareth Davies, Managing Director, Frog. Married with two kids, Alex aged six and Evie aged three.
VitAL: What got you started in IT?
GD: I borrowed a friend’s Sinclair Spectrum when I was 11. My dad bought me a BBC Micro for Christmas – after tinkering with it for a while I realised that I could make it do anything I wanted. I wrote my first stock control system at 12, started developing games from home at 16 for two companies and left school at 16 knowing what I wanted to do.
VitAL: Was there any one person or organisation that was your inspiration?
GD: No, not really, I look at Steve Jobs nowadays, but no-one back then.
VitAL: What was your first IT job, what was your first major IT triumph?
GD: My first IT job was on a YTS (Youth Training Scheme) in a mechanical / electrical engineering company where I was employed to help out in any way I could. I ended up developing a planning / spreadsheet system for them to do all their job scheduling on. My first triumph was probably the development of a complete ERP system from scratch for a group of textile companies.
VitAL: Did you ever make any embarrassing mistakes? What did you learn from them?
GD: Too complicated to explain here, but I once forced an element of the textile system in because it was ‘technically right’ without thinking about human beings. I learned over that period that technology was all about people and not computers, which has served me extremely well since then – an embarrassing mistake that has shaped my career!
VitAL: What do you like best about your job?
GD: The freedom to create whatever we want and the ability to make a difference – we are genuinely improving the quality of education in the UK and that’s more fulfilling than you can imagine.
VitAL: What is your biggest ambition?
GD: To create an internationally trusted brand in Frog – we make a difference locally, no reason why we can’t do it abroad too!
VitAL: What are your hobbies or interests?
GD: I love cars, keeping fit, reading (personal development stuff mainly), and of course the kids.
VitAL: What is the secret of your success?
GD: Understanding that people like to have fun – all the time – everyone! This influences the way our business runs, the way we write our software, the way we market ourselves, and the way we work with our customers. Frog is as much a family as it is a business. It’s a very big family nowadays, but a family nonetheless.
I guess also never giving up – building a business is really difficult, especially in the very early stages when both business and personal money is tight – giving up never entered my head, it just wasn’t an option. My personal experience of building a business is that it’s about building as much value as possible into what you do and then surviving long enough for the market to learn about what you’re doing.
VitAL: Gareth Davies, thank you very much.
