Concentrix president believes business mistakes are valuable if a lesson is learned

Chris Caldwell is president of a billion-dollar corporation that employs 54,000 people - including 1,800 in Northern Ireland. It is hard to see how he would be sympathetic to failure in any shape or form.

Caldwell is president of Concentrix, part of the Fortune 500 family whose parent is the Synnex Corporation which recently posted its 110th consecutive profitable quarter – and grew revenues in 2014 to $13.8 billion (€12.2 billion)

Not the kind of organisation that does not like results then.

So when Caldwell during his latest trip to Belfast shared his own personal philosophy with aspiring business people that if a certain venture looks doomed – you should “Fail fast, fail often and fail cheap” – it appeared he might have taken a walk on corporate crazy street.

But not so. Because Caldwell, who by his own admission “started very young in business” believes anyone who has ever experienced failure can learn valuable lessons that can make them much stronger and smarter. He speaks from experience – at one stage, he was happily running a very successful business and then decided to invest, on the advice of others, in another firm.

Gut feeling

“I didn’t just lose my shirt,” he says “I lost my pants and my shoes before I walked away but I did learn something from it that I didn’t know before. I learned to go with my gut. I learned that to be successful you must commit, invest and manage and that experience is part of who I am today.

“I learned as much from my failure as I did from my successes,” Caldwell says.

In Belfast to take part in the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce Growing Something Brilliant leadership series, he said the stigma of failure can make people hold back from taking a risk.

“This isn’t something that just Northern Ireland suffers from – it is part of the global corporate culture, business entrepreneurs fear having to take a walk of shame if something fails, but we need to spread the message that failure is okay – if the person learns from it, is accountable and moves on.

“I am not saying failure is okay if you don’t learn, don’t take responsibility and don’t do things differently and you blame everyone else.

“But if you haven’t banked the family farm and you have admitted quickly that you made a mistake and you take on board what went wrong then there is an opportunity to innovate and do things differently next time around.”

He believes people who have previously failed in business can use the experience to their advantage. “I’ve hired people who lost businesses, whose company wasn’t successful and the experience has shown me that very often business is in their DNA and they just needed the right opportunity to come along. And what they bring to an organisation is all of the skills they learned in their business – from managing payroll to dealing with people, to their sales experience. And of course their knowledge about what will not work.”

He believes one of the most fundamental attributes you can have if you want to succeed in any business sector is the ability to take a risk. Caldwell highlights Concentrix’s ever-expanding operations in Northern Ireland as a good example of a risk paying off.

Risk rewarded

Concentrix arrived in the North in 2011 via the acquisition of Belfast-based Gem, a multilingual customer contact centre, originally founded by local entrepreneur

Philip Cassidy

in 2000. Caldwell says: “Philip and the folks who set up Gem took a big risk – for many years they reinvested all their revenue back into the business . . . They took a risk and when the business was sold to Concentrix they were well-rewarded.”

He says it is a major tribute to Northern Ireland that many of the people who set up and grew Gem are the same team leading the business today – Cassidy is now a senior vice-president with Concentrix. “We’re very committed to Northern Ireland. Last year we announced plans to create a further 1,000 new jobs.”