The master: Katherine Corich

Not many company founders would take it as a badge of honour to be considered dispensable. But for Katherine Corich, the entrepreneur behind international business management consultancy Sysdoc, building a business to a point that it can thrive without you is something you shout about.

Corich, the Ernst & Young 2010 Master Entrepreneur of the Year, says entrepreneurs tend to be thought of as lone wolves. She’s anything but, and the reality is that Sysdoc is thriving on the global stage because of the strength of her team.

“Years ago one of my earliest mentors told me ‘Katherine, if you’re going to be successful you need to remember you’re about as indispensable as the hole I leave when I take my hand out of a bucket of water’.”

There’s no denying her approach works. With offices in Australasia, the US and the UK, and clients in territories as diverse as Kazakhstan and Singapore, the company she founded in 1986 enjoyed sales growth last year of 42% in the UK market. It’s an outstanding performance given the industry average was negative growth of 1.6%.
So what does Sysdoc do exactly? Corich, on the phone from Oxfordshire where she moved four years ago with her husband Maarten and their four children, concedes that most people don’t ‘get’ Sysdoc. “It appears to be intangible. We don’t sell a product. We’re selling a service, but that service depends on what exactly the client needs.”

Boiled down, Sysdoc gets invited in by companies or public sector organisations when things go wrong or when they’re in transition. Corich gives an example of work done recently for Birdseye when it was split from Unilever: Sysdoc designs the new processes and training development required, builds IT knowledge bases, and so on. Clients include blue chip multinationals like Vodafone and IBM.

It’s miles away from the life she once envisaged for herself — 30,000 feet away, in fact. Educated as a linguist, Corich, whose father was a civil aviation inspector, trained to be a commercial pilot. “I still gaze skyward every time a plane goes overhead,” says the self-described “accidental entrepreneur”. But a couple of moments in her 20s prompted her down another path.

The first came when she was airborne with her father over her home town of Kapiti soon after getting her pilot’s licence. Coming in to land, a fierce wind drove the plane sideways. She threw up her hands anticipating her father would take over, but he refused. The lesson? Take responsibility for everything you do in life.

The second happened elsewhere, and to others. It was 1986 and Corich was on her OE, dreaming about life as a pilot, but working in the meantime as part of a team tackling the computerisation of the London stock exchange. It was chaos; nothing connected. Corich, frustrated, suggested to her superiors that they take a leaf from aviation, where process always needs to be optimal, and which makes heavy use of simulator-based training.

They’d given her the okay to implement some of her ideas — she was starting to get a glimpse of the possibilities of applying aviation industry thinking to the commercial world — when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, followed shortly after by the meltdown at Chernobyl.

Corich read the official accident reports with a pilot’s eye. “I wanted to know why they happened. Was it equipment failure? Poor decisions? Because people didn’t understand the formal processes they needed to follow? Or were they just not well trained? In both accidents it was a combination of all of those things. Going more deeply into it, I realised that there was a gap, and it was the same gap I’d been seeing in my commercial work. There were opportunities out there to do what we do.”

She also realised that she had a unique combination of skills: the commercial aviation side, the linguistics and also a deep IT knowledge, from work done in her varsity holidays and also post-graduation at IBM.

“It was an ‘aha!’ moment. I thought ‘this combination of skills is going to be transformational as a business and I want to be part of leading that journey’.”

You get a real sense of mission when Corich talks like this. She is clearly proud of the difference her company has made to the lives of its clients. (“I think most entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to change the world.”). But she’s equally proud of how Sysdoc works for its people — that team thing, again. Sysdoc’s employees go off to have children, sabbaticals, build houses; they’re able to participate in the lives of their families while also building a successful global business.

“The thing I’ve found most incredible since I arrived in England four years ago is that we’re now being picked up as thought leaders,” says Corich. “It’s believed that the model we’ve created, which is so embedded in our DNA, is really the way forward for innovation and entrepreneurship globally.”

Corich says she is more excited about Sysdoc’s growth prospects now than at any time. “Look at the BP disaster. With the technical advances we’ve had, the advanced management training that we have around the world now, that shouldn’t have happened. You can read that report and go back to Challenger and Chernobyl.

“And the world is saying ‘we need this’. We need to simplify our public service; we need to get more productive and efficient in how we manage the delivery of services. It really is the right time for a company like ours.”

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The young entrepreneur: Daniel Robertson

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