During the course of 2022, Bango was awarded many accolades including; ‘Quoted Company of the Year’ from Business Weekly, a ‘SAMMY’ for our Bango Audiences product, an eCommerce award for our ‘digital vending machine’ proposition and the ‘Diversity Champion’ award at the AIM awards to name just a few.
Bango is growing quickly, and our products are increasingly grabbing attention in our markets, something reflected in the awards won last year. Behind this success is a driven and hardworking team, led by a focused and dedicated Management team, including Bango CEO, Paul Larbey.
This week, Paul featured in the CIO Times as one of the Top 5 Emerging Business Leaders in the Industry. As well as picking Paul’s brains for his top business advice, the article also provided interesting insight into Paul’s leadership style and the way he prioritizes business decisions.
A few highlights from the Q&A include:
Describe your working style in a few words?
High energy – I am an all or nothing person. If you are in, you need to be 100% in.
Competitive – I like to win and be part of a team that wants to win.
Demanding – I set high standards and a fast pace, especially for myself.
How would others define your communication style?
In one word – transparent – which is one of our values at Bango. I like to know what’s going on and hate hierarchies…I learn more by the coffee machine than in several hour of video calls.
As a leader, it is extremely crucial that one is decisive and rational. What do you do when you are stuck or confused?
Decision making is critical. As a leader, you need to be comfortable making decisions without all the information – operating in shades of grey is how I would describe this – the are very few occurrences where there is an absolute right or wrong and you have all the facts.
State us your major achievements and your company’s achievements under your leadership.
We launched a platform that enables telcos to bundle not just one or two products, but hundreds of third party subscription services with their broadband packages and telco packages. We have since rebranded this as the Bango Digital Vending Machine…leading telcos including Verizon, T-Mobile and Liberty Global have standardized on the Bango Digital Vending Machine for their third-party subscriptions business. …In August, we acquired the global payments division of NTT DOCOMO. This almost doubles our size in terms of revenue but also trebled the number of employees. This transformative acquisition accelerated our position in the market by over 2 years.
What would you advise to the budding entrepreneurs?
Hire people smarter than you. Make sure you really understand your product-market fit. What’s happening in the market that your products benefit in some way. However, don’t try to get it perfect. Be roughly right and then iterate. If you try to build the perfect product, the perfect product offer etc, you will be late to a market that will have changed by the time you get there.
You can find the full article here: https://theciotimes.com/magazin/Top-Five-Emerging-Business-Leaders-in-the-industry-v1/#page=25
