INNOVATORS VS COVID 19

Peter Gillett of Zuant on Tech Survival in Covid-19

Published

3 years ago

02/09/2021

Kossi Adzo

We talked to Peter Gillett of Zuant about the go to lead capture app for sales, events and marketing teams, and he had the following to say:-

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Peter Gillett: Compared to many people, I think we’ve got away so far very lightly, just by being immensely cautious and staying out of trouble!

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Zuant.

Peter Gillett: A keen pioneer of marketing innovation, I formed Marketpoint in 1982 to deliver database marketing and CRM systems to companies globally, and also enjoy wider product design and development: “Winner of British Federation’s Award for Design and Innovation”, “Finalist in BBC’s Tomorrow’s World – Prince of Wales Competition for Industrial Design & Production”, and in 1997 launched the “World’s First cloud-based CRM system” for Lucent Technologies.

Early on, I enjoyed a successful motor racing career and still competes for fun today. This led to establishing sports style commentaries for a number of sports – Radio Le Mans, Radio Silverstone and Radio Wimbledon to add to the mix.

How does Zuant innovate?

Peter Gillett: We’re still small, and therefore can be very light and agile, and combine a very strong sense of listening to clients’ needs, especially at the moment, and then driving through the product development process with regular weekly updates for the whole tech team.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Peter Gillett: The effect was unbelievably fast as our software was targeted a hundred per cent on the events industry! This led to a 10 times reduction in income within the space of about six weeks, which in turn led to slashing overheads across-the-board.

Our survival has then been linked to very close communications with our clients to obtain their continued support whilst waiting for live events to restart later this year.

This has largely been successful and, combined with new products to suit the virtual events market, has kept the company in play.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Peter Gillett: Frankly, the cutbacks were so severe, we didn’t really have any difficult choices.

The lessons learnt have been to react very quickly and maintain strong daily communications with the remaining team.

What specific tools, software and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

Peter Gillett: Driving a company meeting on zoom on a daily basis has been vital along with other internal communications to keep in touch with all team members whilst they’re working from home.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Peter Gillett: Most of our competitors are based in the US, and we’ve noticed that we are starting to pick up some business where they’ve disappeared through the Covid crisis; so it’s a question of keeping overheads really low and staying in the game until we come out of this.