Evolving the business: Insights from the CEO with Nick Koiza

In our latest edition of Insights from the CEO, Nick Koiza, CEO of Smart Component Technologies (SCT), describes the steps SCT has taken to evolve a business from R&D startup to commercial scale-up.  

Q: What was your ambition for SCT’s evolution when you joined almost four years ago?

Nick Koiza: When I joined SCT, I took over from the previous leadership that was more technically focused. The business was more of an R&D focused startup and. I was brought in to provide more of a commercial orientation to the company. 

So, essentially, I joined SCT with the goal of transitioning the company from an R&D-driven startup to a commercially successful, scalable business poised for further growth and expansion. 

My focus is on things like establishing strong customer relationships, building out a professional team and developing strong processes. The strength of your technical and commercial processes and governance is critical to moving a business forward. It’s what makes the difference when you’re transitioning from an R&D focused organisation to one that can grow and fund its own growth. 

In evolving SCT, I’ve been keen to position the company for growth by expanding our capabilities and exploring new product and market opportunities beyond the initial focus areas. So, there’s still a strong R&D element and a firm commercial focus.  

Q: What have been some of the key challenges you've faced as CEO, and how have you approached addressing them?

Nick Koiza: Evolving a business is nothing but challenges and we’ve been challenged throughout! But we’ve been very good at getting over the hurdles and have come a long way since the startup mode. 

My approach in addressing these challenges, is to take time to make a decision. Carefully consider decisions rather than rushing into them, and don’t make important decisions without having enough information to do so confidently, so the right decisions can be made.

I’d say that if something isn’t immediately obvious, then don't make a decision without enough to go on. When things are a little bit unclear, I've not made an immediate decision. I've let things happen, given a little bit of time, or even thought overnight before making key decisions.

This doesn't mean avoiding risks or being indecisive but rather consulting with the professional experts running our multi-disciplinary teams to ensure decisions are well-informed.

Q: Has there been anything in particular that has made you change direction as the business has grown?

Nick Koiza: There hasn’t been any particular threat or competition situation that has made us change the direction of the business. I think we were in a fortunate position when we launched the SWiX product, that the user interface was at a level where we could add more things in that aligned with what the customers wanted. 

We could have gone down the route of building a fully-fledged product that wasn't necessarily what the customers were looking for, and found ourselves providing too much, but too much of the wrong thing. We came in with something more rudimentary, but which allowed us to build in lots of additional capabilities over the past couple of years that customers have actively asked for. 

This has put us in the strong competitive position where we're building exactly what was required. So rather than having to change direction, SCT has been able to stay focused on building what customers wanted. 

Q: What are the next steps for the continued evolution of SCT’s products and for the business?

Nick Koiza:  We're taking a multi-pronged approach to evolve both our products and business. 

For our rail infrastructure monitoring solutions, we're looking to expand product capabilities beyond critical assets to address other rail infrastructure needs like earthworks and general maintenance areas.

With our Smart Washer technology, we're developing variants for different bolt sizes so we can move into other industries. We’ve made this easier than you might think by building our platform with a common architecture across products. So we can incorporate new sensors and expand our smart component lineup more efficiently.

We're also exploring some interesting partnerships to help us move faster on new solutions. Plus, we're investing more in machine learning and AI. We’re collecting so much data from the growing network of our devices out in the field which will really enhance the analytics and decision support we provide to customers.

In the longer term, I see us working towards a more unified ‘command and control’ type of system that can integrate all these different monitoring solutions into a comprehensive platform. This is something we’re actively exploring with customers, as they’ve been asking for it specifically.

Q: What is the one piece of wisdom or advice you would share from your experience as CEO?

Nick Koiza: Above all, I place relationships at the centre of business success. So, my advice would be to keep relationships at the heart of everything you're doing. Having good relationships with your staff, with customers, with partners gives you the best basis for progressing. Look after your people, and in the long run that's what pays dividends.