Last Friday I met with Gary Turner, UK CEO of Xero for a breakfast catch up on the company, its progress, initiatives and the like. The meeting was opportune because it was almost a year ago to the week when Gary was announced as Hamish Edwards successor. At the time I remember Gary grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of taking Hamish’s foundational work and accelerating growth in the UK.
Gary made it clear he wants Xero to be the number one player in the SaaS accounting space. It is hard to argue that the combination of clever use of social tools such as the blog they have, the emphasis on driving functionality, onboarding of new accounting partners and hitting the 20,000 user milestone are contributing to the perception that Xero is leading the way. It hasn’t all been plain sailing.
Gary told me that despite Xero having a tiny organization in the UK (there’s just 8 of them), it’s still necessary to pay attention to process: “When things are moving as quickly as they are for us, it’s easy to forget that businesses of all sizes need processes. Having sensible processes in place is a must do item.” Onboarding customers through the accounting channel remains an issue but Gary says they’re slowly but surely getting there. On partner acquisition Gary had this to say: “When we get in front of a firm we have a 100% success rate.”
I was interested in learning what works and what doesn’t: “We’re learning all the time. It’s clear that traditional marketing has its place but there are lots of other things we can do, some of which we don’t know will work. So we’re experimenting and failing early so that we don’t waste time and money on things that are not effective. But to give you an example, we thought we’d try some certification stuff. The first session we ran as a webinar and 50 people turned up. That was off the back of a single email invitation. I was more worried about the technology falling over – which thankfully it didn’t – but that taught us there is a genuine demand to learn more about cloud accounting. We just didn’t realise the scale of interest.”
In other areas, Xero is finding an enthusiastic audience among virtual assistants. “They’re incredible. They’ll answer questions about how to get things done so in one sense they are taking the burden for support away from us in some areas while at the same time acting as great advocates for Xero.” How often do you hear that among users?
A year on and still as keen: “Absolutely. I can honestly say I’ve not had as much fun doing a job of this kind since the early years of Pegasus when we were all fighting for market share with the then ‘new’ stuff. It has that same feel only this time I think we can make the kind of changes that previously have eluded the industry.” And with that, Gary dashed off up Piccadilly to his next appointment.
