"I've thought about what resilience means to UltramapGlobal. More than anything else, I think the key is preparing for, managing and mastering change. Resilience has played a big part in getting us from client number one, to world number one."
This issue: RESILIENCE
Martin Connelly is Co-Founder of UltramapGlobal, protecting many of the world’s most important subsea cables. UltramapGlobal monitor 100 million vessel movements daily. If a cable is threatened, Global Monitoring Teams intervene. Nobody has monitored more, for longer. That’s why UltramapGlobal’s AssetMonitor software is the world’s most used.
In the early days however, if Martin hadn’t been resilient, the UltramapGlobal story would have been very different.
Confidence Trick.
UltramapGlobal’s flagship product is its AssetMonitor software. Over a decade ago, version one was developed inside the large, well known and well established company that Martin worked for.
And when the opportunity to acquire the software and set up a brand new, much smaller business around it arose, Martin and his business partner took it. The prospects were good, but in the immediacy, there were many challenges. Martin explains:
“From the beginning, we loved the software and the opportunity to own and grow it. But the greatest trick was persuading customers that had confidence in the previous much bigger owner – to have confidence in us.
“People don’t like change. Business doesn’t like change. Even with the long-term prospect of more focussed leadership.
“We persuaded existing customers we’d deliver seamlessly. Thankfully, every customer of the bigger company had the confidence to come with UltramapGlobal.”
Excitement and Responsibility.
In the beginning, UltramapGlobal was just two people. It was exciting! But Martin soon realised that with the big excitement – comes big responsibility.
“Suddenly, it was just Des and I. That was it. We were protecting client assets worth millions. Resilience came in once more when we were faced with rapid early growth. We needed the best infrastructure, the best partnerships and the best people. And we were doing most things for the very first time. It was hard.”
One lesson Martin learned early on was the importance of choosing good partners and suppliers.
“In the very early days, one mission critical supplier let us down. They were going through similar things to us, so whilst we could empathise, we still had to be resilient enough to react and replace them. When it comes to key partnerships, their performance and reputation – is our performance and reputation.”
Build Resilience In.
For UltramapGlobal today, resilience is key for the core offering, as well as how the business runs. “Our work is binary. A client cable is either safe, or it isn’t safe. We’re proud that all our clients have fewer cable strikes once we have been appointed. And over half of UltramapGlobal customers have no cable strikes at all. We save clients billions. We build resilience in. Because our resilience – is their resilience.”
www.ultramapglobal.com