My biggest mistake: Tristan Sternson, CEO of ARQ Group and co-lead of NCS NEXT

Throughout his decades-long career in IT, Australian tech industry pioneer Tristan Sternson has always held his drive to create meaningful impact through digital technology solutions close to his heart.

Today, Sternson is the CEO of ARQ Group, one of Australia’s leading providers of digital tech services, with a client base spanning government agencies and enterprise organisations, including more than half of Australia’s top 20 ASX-listed companies. He is also the co-lead of Singtel’s global digital tech firm, NCS NEXT.

But a few years ago Sternson found himself caught in the crosshairs in the transition from startup to established business with a big project in the works.

Because even tech industry veterans with decades of experience can make mistakes.

The mistake

Making the transition from a startup to an established business is probably one of the greatest leaps you can take as a business owner or CEO, and it brings with it a whole new set of challenges.

Sternson says his biggest mistake happened when his company decided to take on a project that was double the size of the biggest project it had ever previously had.

“The work we do is kind of large, end of town, corporate, top ASX 50 companies or large government departments; our projects are quite large. And they can be nine to 12 months building a mobile app and cloud journey or data environments and topics, they can be quite big.”

While the team would be “celebrating the win” of securing a big project, Sternson says, they weren’t necessarily planning for “what happens once you deliver”.

“At the end of a project you’ve delivered something enormous. You’ve got all these people, because the size of the project determines the number of people we need to build something, and then what do you do at the end of it?”

Sternson admits he “wasn’t as involved” as he should have been in this instance.

“At that time, we were integrating three businesses. I was the CEO of one of them. But I was taken as an executive across the whole group, taking over the rest of the group, and had the most experience in this space,” he recalled.

“So I got a little bit involved, but probably not enough involved. And because we had this enormous project delivered amazingly well, at the end of it, we had 25 of our entire workforce on the bench, which is a big problem with nowhere to go.

“When you’ve got that many people sitting on your bench with nowhere to go, it’s a real drain on cash and on your profits and everything else. So we had an amazing 12 months, and everyone was very happy and then right at the end, we kind of hit a brick wall.”

The context

A former IT graduate and coder, Sternson joined the then six-man telco startup Dodo fresh out of university in 2001 and was instrumental in the company’s early evolution and success, until Dodo was acquired in 2013 for $203 million.

In 2008, undeterred by the Global Financial Crisis, he founded data and analytics firm InfoReady, where he was managing director for 10 years, leading the business across Asia-Pacific and Europe, before it was acquired by ARQ (formerly Melbourne IT) for $35 million.

Since being appointed CEO of ARQ in December 2019, Sternson has overseen a considerable turnaround in the business, which culminated in ARQ’s recent $290 million acquisition by Singtel subsidiary NCS in April 2022, resulting in a 1900-person local workforce.

Sternson has also established education programs including The Digital Experience (TDx) within the ARQ Academy pillar, which he says have had a direct impact on the nation’s tech skills shortage, and led to a 75% growth in ARQ’s head count.

The impact

Sternson says he has always prided himself on being quite transparent.

“We’re a people business and we always share a lot of things personally, I wasn’t as involved,” he said.

“We were part of an acquisition of about three businesses at the time integrating in and we weren’t operating as a team.

“But taking charge at the right point in time is quite a difficult thing to do when you have other businesses, other founders, other corporate executives all in one area trying to integrate in together.”

The fix

For Sternson, the key components to fixing the mistake were owning it and hustling.

“We love to hustle. That’s my way of operating everything, we call sales hustles and just really getting in and getting people off to work and doing stuff,” he said.

“The other part was really owning the mistake. We had some other leaders in the business involved and it was always someone else’s problem. But we had a moment towards the end of 2019, where I came in, and I just kind of put my hand up and said “Look, we messed up and we should have been more prepared”.

“If you do that, then everyone rallies together. If you don’t do that, then you’re on your own. And then it’s a big problem to fix in real-time and that’s something that stuck with us long term.”

The lesson

Sternson says one of the biggest lessons learnt from the mistake was that it’s okay to make errors but you must have the courage to put your hand up if you mess up. He urges business owners and entrepreneurs to never underestimate the power of being more involved and exercising caution.

“The problem was obviously the celebrating kind of too early and I wasn’t directly involved; I should have really ingested myself into it,” he said.

“It’s important to introduce caution with everything that you’re doing, no matter what you do in any business.

“You get excited, you get to the starting point, but you’ve always got to make sure you mitigate the risk along the way.”