Patrick McCarthy joined Precisely as Chief Revenue Officer late last year. An experienced executive, he will aim to deliver accelerated growth for Precisely during a time when it is acquiring companies at least once a quarter. Enterprise Times had the opportunity to talk about his objectives, challenges and more recently. First, why did you take the opportunity to join Precisely rather than somebody else?
McCarthy replied: “It always comes down to the people. Josh and the ELT (Executive Leadership Team) are fantastic, and they’re backed by a wonderful set of investors. The second is solving meaningful, horizontal business problems is always very interesting.
“We talk to businesses about real problems from a revenue growth perspective or cost optimization perspective. That is a core key component of what Precisely is capable of doing. Maybe I’d add, also, the opportunity to help clients take advantage of realizing opportunities.”
What have you learned about Precisely you didn’t know before you joined?
“What I didn’t realise is that the mainframe is cooler than I thought. That it’s really big, there’s more mainframe compute power today than there was five years ago, which was really shocking to me. There is a strong and healthy mainframe (market), and there’s a lot of really key critical business, business operations that run inside of that.“
Bringing the lessons from a long career
McCarthy was previously Executive Vice President, Sales & Client Development and spent 15 years at SAP. What are the lessons from RMS that you’re bringing to Precisely?
“RMS is an amazing company. We used to say it was 450 PhDs in development at RMS, so it had real domain expertise. I’m bringing that idea. If you want client intimacy and want to understand a domain, it’s really important that you put the time, effort, and energy into understanding the client intimately. It’s not marketing. I have a deep appreciation for the different kinds of clients in different sectors that we serve and becoming domain experts with them. “
On Products
What are the use cases that excite you about the Precisely products?
“Precisely is creating a category of saying you have to have a great set of tools to get access to data and to govern that data. But that is only part of the story. There is the idea of accuracy and consistency and we have a great set of products there. Where Precisely really differentiates is the context, bringing all these other data elements that surround the context.
“For example, our PlaceIQ acquisition adds more context to what’s happening in a marketplace or more insights around governed, accurate data. That is a real differentiator. I believe that it is truly what clients need – that bigger, broader perspective from a solution provider like Precisely.”
Are you looking at PlaceIQ to replace the third-party and Dynamic Demographics?
“No, it’s an enhancement and an expansion of what we do. Dynamic Demographics is a great solution and has really keen insights. There’s a whole another level that PlaceIQ is at, related to understanding the audience or understanding what you see inside of the mobile data.
“Today, they serve a very distinct marketplace, around people or organisations trying to understand what’s happening around physical locations. This is operating at a much higher level than what we’re doing with Dynamic Demographics, both having a role.”
Priorities
What’s your top priority?
“For my team, it is to make sure that we’re delivering value for our clients and understand explicitly the value that our clients generate with our solutions. Secondly, looking at the business imperatives of our clients, and then understanding and being able to articulate our role in helping them to take advantage of opportunities, or to insulate themselves from some dangers they might have in their business infrastructure.”
How do you understand how your solutions deliver value for the clients?
“Through real conversations with the clients around how are the solutions being leveraged? In what processes? Was this around a revenue enabling scenario? Was this around cost optimization? How do I grow my business in a cost-optimal way? Is it about getting access to the information? These are Excel-based conversations around the impact and the value creation, whether it’s on the revenue side or the cost side.
“I would add, an element here that sometimes can be difficult to capture is around the risk. How are we helping them risk mitigate their business and build highly performant and risk mitigated infrastructures? A big part of what we do for many of our clients is helping them have resiliency in their technical infrastructure.
On challenges
What’s the biggest challenge faced by your sales team?
“The number one opportunity for our team on an ongoing basis is keeping them apprised of what’s happening in the marketplace and keeping them apprised of our constantly evolving organisation, and it’s really exciting to be part of that.
“How does PlaceIQ fit into our overall strategy? We’ve been acquisitive, Winshuttle and Infogix and others. How does all that fit together on an ongoing basis and keep the team apprised of that to express it to our clients? How does it strengthen the value proposition for our clients? These acquisitions are very intentional, related to our broader strategy. So keeping them apprised and able to digest that on an ongoing basis.”
What’s your biggest challenge?
“75 days in, primarily in a remote environment, it’s getting ingrained and attached. I’ve got a big global team. How am I making myself accessible and engaged with that internal team, as well as our clients, on an ongoing basis? Do they feel like they are part of something? My communication mechanisms or my personal availability through those is, I wouldn’t call it a challenge, a top focus to make sure I’m engaged and available to my global teams.”
Looking forward
What do you hope to achieve in 2022?
“We will achieve our financial metrics and goals. Really broad participation in a lot of success, a lot of success for each individual. It’s always great if one person overachieves, but I’m trying to bring the whole team forward.
“We would probably have more acquisitions done that have been well integrated. As we do acquisitions, we’re working on how they understand Precisely better. How do we represent ourselves so that we’ve built an organisation that’s very flexible, dynamic, friendly, and collaborative.”
McCarthy wants the integration and onboarding experience to be a positive experience for those companies. Precisely will also soon expand its Data Integrity Suite with SaaS applications. He hopes for broad client adoption, with many running and live, by the end of the calendar year.
On Partnerships
What’s your approach to partnerships?
“Partners are multipliers, critical to our success. Maybe this is another surprising thing. We are really flexible in how we partner. We work hard to meet the partner where they are and have intentional goals to ensure that the partner has what they need to be successful.
“Most importantly, that they’re able to deliver what our clients need to be successful. We have a very healthy and robust ecosystem that surrounds us. We are aggressively flexible in how we partner to make sure that we can drive great outcomes for clients.”
Are there any partnership areas you need to focus on?
McCarthy said that its technology, hyperscaler, and channel partner ecosystem is strong. One area he thinks needs focus is the system larger systems integrators. He wants to work on their understanding of the Precisely strategy, where Infogix and Winshuttle fit in to leverage them alongside SAP, Oracle and Infor of other solutions.
On Education initiatives
McCarthy was a non-exec board member at the Chicago Tech Academy and has long held an interest in education for business. Is this something you will continue at and within Precisely?
“I am focused on early talent and diverse early talent. I spent a lot of time on Chicago’s West Side and got to see some fantastic kids that were in unbelievable situations. As business leaders, we have a real obligation to give, uncover, and present opportunities to a broader spectrum of people that may exist inside of technology today. I definitely will continue to pursue that.
“We have efforts and energies going on inside Precisely that I’m very supportive of. I will continue to do that outside of the work that I do for Precisely because I think it’s part of just being a good citizen and building a future that’s much stronger than what’s happening today.”
That book question
What was the last book you read? What was your take out from it?
“I’ll give you two. AI superpowers (by Kai-Fu Lee – Amazon Aus, UK, US) fully scared me. There’s a race going on. It was incredibly interesting. It was maybe a little slanted. But it was a very, very interesting read about what is happening in AI worldwide. What do leaders look like related to AI? It is directly related to what Precisely does with bots or machines making decisions. A phenomenal and fantastic information (source) to make the right decisions, an eye-opener.
“For personal reasons. I’ve been following CRISPR for a long, long time. I’m just wrapping up The Code Breakers by Walter Isaacson (Amazon Aus, UK, US), which talks about the whole history of that amazing technological breakthrough. It’s a combination of business and personal lessons. It’s a very, very exciting book and interesting personally.”
