Interview with Vin Murria OBE

Vin Murria was born in India but has known the UK as home for more than 50 years from infancy.  Her father was a bus driver and her mother was a shopkeeper and the family lived above the corner shop they ran.  It was a classic immigrant family type environment, incredibly hardworking, very morally upstanding, with a work ethic that was ingrained.  Her mother was determined that Vin would receive the education that neither she nor her husband had. That meant the local comprehensive, and not being pulled out too early, with the opportunity to finish education, at university and to make a career from there.

Vin worked in the family shop on a daily basis, when not at school or studying. “It was seven in the morning to nine in the evening, every day, seven days a week. It was rarity if you ever got Christmas off.  Your job was to either stock the shelves, to take items down to price, or to serve people. When I could drive, I had to get up at four o’clock in the morning and go to the warehouse.  It was the only way I got to keep the car for the rest of the day.  We never went clubbing. If you weren’t home after school at four o’clock, the search parties were sent out. We were very conservative, very sensible, very focused. A great family culture, you were home, you studied, or you worked in the shop.”

The family’s corner shop gave her an insight into consumers, “how difficult people are and how you deal with them, and the behaviour patterns,” as well as learning how to deal with banks, accountants and the Inland Revenue.  Later, when the business had financial difficulties, she ended up taking a year out to fight the banks and the accountants and the Inland Revenue, and won. “It was the most amazing formative lesson. What it taught me was not to necessarily trust the accountants, they can get it wrong, and banks are always there when you’re having good times. You have to be very careful with them, don’t ever over-borrow and if you do, make it such a big borrowing that it’s the bank’s problem, not yours.  Or don’t borrow, so that you’ll never put yourself in that position, and certainly don’t leverage your own home or personal assets.

At school, Vin studied maths, physics and chemistry at A level before realising that she didn’t want to do any of those subjects at degree.  A family friend suggested, ‘Why don’t you try this new fangled thing called technology; it looks like it’s quite an interesting thing, and it actually combines all three.’  That sounded like a good idea and was how Vin started.

At school her energy was recognised by one of the teachers: “He was a fabulous individual, who basically realised that this energy ball that he had on his hands was very driven, very focused. I was always fighting for the right cause and at that time there was a lot of negative Asian behaviour. There were skinheads etc, but I never backed down.  It wasn’t in my gift.  I just wasn’t that kind of person.  I was never going to let somebody beat me. I’d end up in battles because I was protecting somebody else, somebody who was being abused and I’d end up being hauled up in front of the headmaster. They couldn’t argue with what I was doing because it was the right thing to do but I learnt my lesson, which was that way that of fighting back doesn’t help: you need to go through the system, get an education to win, because somewhere along the line, somebody will be bigger than you.”

Vin went to a London University to study for a degree in maths and computing, The degree had a year in industry, which meant going to work with computers in the manufacturing world, looking at technology being implemented. It was that year when women in engineering was a big thing. “While I was there, I ended up doing my final year project around a corporation who needed help in that space, and while I was doing that research I met the company I would go on to work for, and that was the foundation of everything else I’ve ever done.”

During her final year at university, Vin was head-hunted and persuaded to meet Kevin Overstall, the CEO of Kewill Systems. She says: “It was only a £3 million market cap company, but the minute we met he spotted my talent and I just felt there’s something here. At the end of the interview, I remember saying to him, ‘what job are you going to give me?’ I was still at university but he said, ‘Well, you could do this, this or this, which one would you like?’ I asked, ‘Which one pays the most?’ And that’s how I took my role as salesperson and I beat every target they had ever had in the history of the company. I couldn’t understand why people would pay you lots of money for being nice to them and helping them out. I mean it was just like normal, isn’t that what you did?”

Within a year Kewill Systems bought their very first acquisition, Trifid Software in Congleton, and Vin was asked if she would like the role of managing director; a year into her career she was turning around a business with a £5 million turnover but losing £800,000.

 For the next thirteen years, Vin did an acquisition every single year. She adds: “My job was to go in, fix it, turn it round, and then we’d buy another one, and go off to the next one. By about the third or fourth, I was buying them. I did thirteen in thirteen years and every year I would be given more equity, so I never stopped. I learnt the trade from the team at Kewill, who had been a management consultancy for 30 years and had developed their own playbook for what a great business should operate like, and I had then implemented that playbook in every organisation.”

The CEO retired after ten years and Vin subsequently became group COO. Valuation grew from £3 million market cap in 1986, when she joined, to £1.2 billion ($1.8Bn) in March 2000, which is when she chose to leave.

Vin describes Kevin’s influence on her life as transformational. She says: “He created a playbook that most private equity guys are only doing now, and I got to learn it 30 years ago.  To set up a naïve, green individual to run a business, in what was their very first acquisition, was a brave move for both sides but I was naïve enough to think I could do anything. You don’t get many opportunities like that and it’s a lesson. I always say to people, don’t look at what you lose, if somebody offers you something just say yes because it’s an amazing way of going forward.  If you say ‘Yes,’ you are amazed at what doors will open up. Even if it goes wrong, you always learn much more than ever something going right.”

Vin did not initially set out to start up on her own, but ended up starting a new business in September 2002 called Computer Software Group.  She then went on to repeat her successful process she’d developed at Kewill but in different markets. She adds: “At Kewill manufacturing, logistics and e-commerce were the three verticals. In reality, if you understand manufacturing and ERP, you can understand any business. My new company was in the legal and not for profit arena. Legal and not for profit are incredibly similar, they are really CRM type businesses, the legal looks after client money, the not-for-profit look after donor money, so it’s a very similar formula. We ended up becoming the number one player in that space.  We grew from nothing, merged with Iris in 2007, and ended up selling in 2007 for £500 million ($800M).

Vin attributes success to a combination of organic growth, heavily contributed to by merger and acquisition, and a buoyant market. “What we do is buy what are often great businesses, where the founders are ready to retire, or are risk-averse, and often they’re in markets whereby there’s lots of little players all beating each other up in the market. We consolidate the entire market, so rather than fighting each other they get the economies of scale and then make them work together to own the market rather than fight against each other. That in itself creates lots of value and lots of opportunity. Off the back of that, you create other opportunities for those customers.”

In 2007, Vin sold and took some time out to travel.  When she returned, she decided to start again by launching Advanced Computer Software Group in September 2008. The business focused on healthcare business applications. She sold the business to private equity after seven years for £765M ($1.1Bn) and later was sold again in 2019 for £2Bn ($3Bn)

Vin says: “What private equity do is not so much asset-stripping; as being price-conscious.  Software is one of those areas whereby if you’ve got it ingrained and it’s mission critical, you are not going to change your software system.  You’re not going to change your accounting system if they increase a price by £10 a month, you don’t change Netflix if they put the price up by £2 a month. That’s the model, they get you hooked, you are tied in, you can’t really go anywhere, and then you will, on average, see seven to ten per cent price increases. There’s a point when you might change, but then they pull back. We were a very, very, successful business, but whereas we would have worked on 25 per cent profit margin, they work on 45 per cent. That’s the nature of the business. There is a massive drive towards private equity because they have all the money, and the regulation in public markets is so ridiculously heavy that it drives great management teams to private equity.”

Asked about how a software company works internationally, Vin says: “You tend to focus on the UK market for the UK, and then we had a bunch of acquisitions in the States, but you have to have a US-centric product in the US. It’s different today because of SaaS and Amazon web services etc. The software has moved on, rather than have a software resident in your premises, in your location, it’s now resident in the cloud, and you get access as a user. It doesn’t matter where your software is, you could be in Outer Mongolia as far as anyone’s concerned, you just use the data services.

“That also gives you some kind of uniformity because the core functionality might be the same, but then you will do different things, some components that each country will see.  For example, we have VAT and Intrastat in the UK and Europe, but they don’t have that in the States, they have sales tax.  So, the core component will be the same, but then you’ll have subsets that are different, and those will be only seen in those territories.”

Asked what is next, whether she is going to invest or run a business, Vin says: “I do both and I’m looking for companies right now.  I’m doing both, buy-and-build companies and investing.”

Vin says that she has not been motivated by money. She adds: “I would never say I started anything thinking I was going to make money; I started it because I couldn’t do anything else. I have a very simple philosophy: do the right things. Don’t take shortcuts; do what is the right thing and get that right and if you get that right, everything else follows.

“If you get the front end of a business right, the sales engine and the marketing engine, and make sure that products are dealt with properly, and the customers are really looked after, and you motivate your people, guess what – you make money.”

 In addition, Vin is passionate about working with people and helping them to achieve their goals and their ambitions.  The reason I do it is, first of all, this is what I love doing, it’s not a job, it’s a hobby. People like to run, they like to do triathlons et cetera, this is what I love doing, this is my passion.

“Secondly, I am such a privileged person, getting to meet amazing founders and CEOs. They tell me their life stories but I then get the opportunity to buy their business and work with them to create something. It’s a real privilege to be in that kind of position.”

“I think the biggest mistake we ever made was to buy a services business which wasn’t our normal line of business, and it had a very aggressive culture. … It looked like, and was, a really interesting business, except that the cultural clash between our organisation and their organisation was such that it took us two years to recover from it. It wasn’t the fact that it wasn’t successful as a transaction; it was the fact that we wasted two years of opportunity time trying to fix things that we should never have got ourselves into.  Those are things you learn lessons from.

Asked about whether the UK has the ability to create software giants such as Microsoft etc, Vin says it’s not a matter of having the ability it is more the desire to push on after building successfully in the UK.

She says: “We have a situation whereby people would sell sufficient to be very comfortable selling just to the UK marketplace, and then after they’ve made their five, ten, fifteen, twenty million pounds, their house in Spain is paid for, the kids’ education is done, and they’re comfortable, they don’t have to take another risk. Therefore, there is tendency to exit early; which is, of course, totally understandable.

“We’ve created the equivalent of four unicorns over the last 30 years, and that’s unusual. Most people look at you as if you’re strange if you want to do it a second time and a third time and a fourth time, because there is a risk-averseness about putting yourself out there.

“I always believe that people don’t always think they did it because of their skills; they did it because they were lucky. I’m sure there was an element of luck in it, but I’m absolutely comfortable in the ability for me to just look at something and say, ‘Now this is what’s wrong with it, this is how we need to fix it, and this is not what we need to do.’ Business is common sense and often it doesn’t become very common when people get too close to the situation.”

Asked if the high proportion of men in IT ever put her off, Vin says: “If I’m brutally honest, I never took any notice of it. I was so focused, I had no idea that it was an issue. Looking back on it, it was probably at the time a massive advantage.”

On her third day of work at Kewill, Vin was told that she would not be successful because there were three things wrong with her: she was Asian, young and female. She says: “Whenever I meet that person now, I say, ‘Guess what?  I’ve fixed one of those.’ I’m not so young any more. The reality was that I never thought of that as my chip; that was their problem. I chose instead to understand the industry, to come across with domain expertise, and to understand my piece so that when I spoke to somebody it was with professionalism and with clarity and understanding of their business, this meant that those same characteristics (Asian, young, female) became a major asset, because people never forgot you. People still come up to me at an event or something and say, ‘Hi Vin.  Do you remember me?  I met you 31 years ago’, and they vividly remember it because they never saw anyone like me.

“If you go into a room of private equity, you will see a lot of white male and pale, and then you see me.  Sometimes, when I’ve been introduced to about seven or eight people, I jokingly say, ‘Guys, you really have to forgive me, you all look the same to me.’ They literally fall off their seats laughing. You can either be concerned about it, or you can use it as your strength. I would suggest to anyone that feels threatened by it, don’t be as diversity is actually a major asset.”

Vin highlights the innovation that comes with great diversity. She adds: “If you have too many of the same background, history and culture, you never get the benefit of diversity, and that level of innovation. I think 53 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies had an immigrant founder or co-founder.”

She highlights the large corporations in the US run by Indians, including, Google, Microsoft with Satya, Adobe, adding: “In Palo Alto, there are so many of them, and then if we look at over here, four of the top powerbases are Rishi Sunak, Sadiq Khan, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel. Diversity does bring a new way of thinking and actually, more importantly, it should bring a new wave of innovation.”

Vin says she works hard to ensure that women are promoted in the companies with which she is involved. She hopes that hybrid working will help to eliminate some of the pressures on women who have caring roles, such as childcare, and help women progress. She says: “I’m convinced hybrid working will benefit women. Hybrid working with both parents will actually allow more parents to co-share and co-parent, and hopefully that in itself will enable more women to take a front seat.”

For young people thinking about starting out as entrepreneurs in tech in the UK, Vin says: “It’s the most amazing place to be. Look back at the last 30 years and you see there’s a lot happened. If you look forward for the next 30 years, your mind will be blown with what’s going to happen. That, in itself, creates fantastic opportunities across data, analytics, and space. Never mind space exploration; it’s more about what that delivers in ideas. The reason that Silicon Valley was so successful was because they had the US had a space programme and a whole bunch of ideas and technology and innovation came off the back of it. People will create things that you never ever thought you would use until you start using them.

“In the Seventies and Eighties, we would have developed big systems that sat on mainframes, now the winners are the single-point solution app type providers because the market’s changed. Before you could only sell business to business, now you can sell directly to the consumer, and the consumer is the entire population of the world.”

Comparing the issue of raising money in the UK versus the US, Vin adds: “It’s actually very easy to raise money here at the moment., Also you’ve got a lot of the US players over here.  That said, if I was 22, I would go Silicon Valley, but that’s not to say that you can’t do it here. Valuations over in the USA are different and there appears to be a different motivation and failure is considered learning and nothing more.”

Asked if Brexit has impacted investment, Vin adds: “The challenge that Brexit has given is dealing with the skillset requirement, but people are learning to adapt to that through nearshoring or offshoring.” She points to the fact that the Government has announced a new visa policy for high skill people in scale-ups and adds: “To be honest, in many ways, what we should be doing is maximising the talent that’s in the UK and if that means we need to train and skill, then that’s what we should be doing.”

Vin is involved in schemes to help train people who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs, she adds: “There are some amazingly bright people doing fantastic things. Not everybody will be successful, but wow, look at the opportunity.  I’ll often do a speech at something and I’ll end up with half a dozen companies that approach me afterwards. There’s not a lack of opportunity.”

Looking to the future, Vin is keen to do more with her charity, educating women. She says: “I want to try and bring more women to the fore. I want them to lead from the front, not just be the token female.” She believes that women often try to be too nice when they do not need to be.  She wants to give women the opportunities she has had. She adds: “If I was 20 years old again, I would do what I’ve done, pretty much the same.  I love what I’ve done, I’ve had the most incredible opportunities and career and great people around me. I want to be able to pass that on, I want to show people that opportunities do exist and are out there for you to grab.  Make your life everything you wish it to be: You deserve it.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstract by Lynda Feeley & Tom Abram