Global success story

Career tips: telecommunications

• Be a good student of your sector so you can adapt when things start changing.
• If you want to be the best you're never going to get there without hard work.
• Look after your customers. They're your best asset.
• If you want to build your own business, you need to apply technology but understand how to sell it and deliver a commercial outcome.

Terry Healy, co-founder of Quickcomm

Learn how to think and you can do or be whatever you want. It's the major lesson Terry Healy says he took from his electrical engineering degree at Ballarat University. And now he is the co-founder of a burgeoning global telecommunications success story.

His company, Quickcomm, which he started in 1996 with friend Mark Evans, has just closed the first global deal awarded in the telecom expense management industry sector, and it's with a top 20 Fortune 500 company.

"That rates us among the very best in our industry," says Terry. "It's the 'world number one' ticket, and that's not bad. We designed the software from the word go and now we're being used globally."

He credits the "learning to think" ethos as his company's biggest asset: "We noticed there was a huge gap in the market for companies to manage their telephone bills. There was nothing else on the market.

"So Mark and I turned our consulting business on its head. We both had a technical background and we saw the commercial application. So we got into software development."

The product, now known as Quickcomm, was born. It automatically sorts through a company's telephone bill, analyses the data, and advises on cost-saving telecommunications solutions for the company.

"We've now been at it for 10 years," says Terry. "It was slow for starters. We had to get the company off the ground. Then the dotcom bubble burst, which explained why no-one wanted to buy anything.

"However, we weathered the storm and now have over 40 employees and our software is used on five continents around the world by top line companies."

Not bad for a boy from Hamilton, in country Victoria. After starting out his working life in engineering support at NEC, before moving into a diversity of roles with the company over the next eight years, Terry decided "if I had to work harder to earn more, I would work harder for myself".

So he did.

"As anyone who's ever started a business knows, you live some pretty lean years," he says. "It's your baby and you take enough to live on and the rest gets ploughed back into the business.

"But we're now starting to achieve the success we always aimed for." Terry thinks that anyone with an idea and commitment in the IT sector has the ability to do what he's done as long as they are "technically aware but commercially focused".

"Identify the things you're not best at," he advises. "Whether that's the technical stuff or the business side of things, and hire other people to do them.

"Being able to apply technology but understand how to sell it and deliver a commercial outcome is the key."