My interview with Mike Wright begins with the CEO leaving the train on his commute into work. As he makes his way up the stairs and out of the station, he tells me about the genesis of Striata, a company he founded in his garage in Johannesburg over 15 years ago.
Wright says it began as an e-mail-focused business delivering messages on behalf of other people. But the team soon realised that clients wanted more - they needed a service that offered authentication and security, which is how the business progressed into secure document delivery and electronic billing.
As Wright mounts his bike to cycle the last stretch of his journey into the office, he outlines how these new demands required them to develop their own technology. "It wasn't long before we realised we couldn't build a business on someone else's tech, so we developed our own. This was a pivotal point in the business. You can start something and just deploy other people's technology or you can become a technology company yourself."
And only at this point, after chatting for ten minutes, does he acknowledge the absurdity of the situation we find ourselves in. "This is multitasking at its finest," he jokes. "I'm doing a media interview, on my bike, on Skype."
When I relay the story to Alison Treadaway, a director at Striata SA and Wright's younger sister, she laughs. "That sounds like Mike. Our parents did always teach us to just make things work." With experience at Internet Solutions and Dimension Data under her belt, Treadaway started her career as Striata's sales and marketing director in
2002. "When Mike approached me about working at Striata, we both wanted to create something of our own."
And the pair have been working together successfully for 13 years.
Sibling support
There's a degree of concern that just goes away when you have someone next to you that you can trust implicitly, says Wright. Treadaway agrees. "When you don't have trust, so much energy is wasted in trying to work out what is actually going on." She attributes their seamless working relationship to the fact that they've never been too involved in each other's personal business, which gives them the confidence of working with a family member but without the dramatics.
"Alison and I complement each other in so many different ways," says Wright. "And I trust her judgement to make the right decisions. I'm about numbers and she's more about people. These two sets of skills make it easier to make good decisions," he says, recognising that their different strengths and weaknesses allow them to work together so well. Treadaway describes Mike as the visionary while she views her role as more of an implementer of company strategies.
"If you were in a meeting with Mike and me, you probably wouldn't guess we were siblings until the inside jokes start," she says. But their collaboration at Striata is not the first time the duo has collaborated. "When Mike was in his early 20s and I was in my teens, he hired me to run his T-shirt printing business," she says. The small business made enough money to pay Wright's way through university and fund Treadaway's postgrad studies.
"Our parents taught us that to succeed, you need to put in the work. They regularly encouraged us to gather the skills we didn't have," says Wright. These principles have formed the basis of the Striata culture. "We've been a very family-orientated business for a very long time. We've had brothers, couples, cousins and extended family working for us. If someone is working late, we all work late."
"Company culture is a big deal for me," says Treadaway, noting that Striata has always aimed to hire people who embody the business work ethic. "Hiring skills over culture fit doesn't work. You can teach skills. You cannot manufacture culture fit." It's a strategy that appears to be working, as both Wright and Treadaway highlight the many 'boomerang' employees who have left the company to seek other opportunities, but soon return to the Striata family.
While the South African contingent is still the biggest part of the business, Wright forecasts that by the middle of next year, the rest of the world will have caught up. They acknowledge that the realities of the local business landscape in the early 2000s, which demanded document delivery rather than document retrieval, shaped the type of business Striata would become.
With close to 30 years' combined experience in the industry, Treadaway and Wright are well-equipped to comment on the future of e-mail, outlining that the communication medium really hasn't changed that much in the last decade. "Those who think that social media will make e-mail irrelevant don't understand that e-mail is the new address," she says. "Social media is a conversation. E-mail is a location."
Wright believes the popularity of social media functions to declutter e-mail. "We're actually quite happy that a lot of the noise that was on e-mail has moved onto other tools. We're not in the same market as WhatsApp or Snapchat; rather, we're taking what was previously sent in the post and delivering that digitally," he notes.
Social media is a conversation. E-mail is a location.
Alison Treadaway
"Ultimately, we just want to do good business and get things done," says Treadaway. "We tend to focus on this before we try to publish things or shine a spotlight on our achievements. We were just a little startup when some of our well-established clients gave us a chance and today, we're celebrating ten years of doing business with many of them."
"I think we have a good story to tell," adds Wright. "We built the platform, went overseas, made mistakes, learnt lessons, persevered, invested, made partnerships where we needed to and established an international business. We have offices on five continents with thousands of clients and employees, which I think proves that it's possible to start a successful international business from your garage in Johannesburg."
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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