How I gave up four years of uni to launch a $50 million business

Andrew Thomas dropped out of his engineering and science degree four and a half years in, with just six months to go, in the hope of taking on some of the IT’s biggest providers of consulting and hardware services.

Now, his company Thomas Duryea Consulting, offers data centre solutions, systems management, enterprise management and consulting services to businesses. It turned over $50 million during 2009-10, and Thomas recently won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the southern region.

He says the gamble paid off, but it was a difficult first few years with relatively no business knowledge. Thomas says he needed to work hard to get the business up to scratch.

How did you end up doing an engineering degree?

If we wind it back to high school, I did work experience at an electronics shop. The reason I went there is that I was always interested in tinkering and pulling things apart – although I never really could put them back together again, which is why I’m not really a manager now.

But the interest I had was around electronics, so I want to RMIT to study computer engineering and science, which had a lot of IT and electronics in it.

And when did you decide to drop out?

It was a five-year degree, because I went for the double-degree option. With engineering you’re doing a lot of sciences and maths, but there was also an opportunity to work in the industry which I really enjoyed.

So I went to do work for a company, and I guess they saw something in young fellas with ambition, so they helped me out and gave me the opportunity to work as a contractor at uni. I was with a friend and we did what’s called roll-out work, which is basically putting PCs on desks.

At that time we were writing a lot of code for automated systems, things like airline reservation systems and so on. This was at school. And we saw some of these companies and what they were delivering, and they were all manual systems. We thought, if these are the biggest companies, there’s an opportunity here to do even better. I left and started up.

You started with friends, is that right?

There were three I started with, two went back to uni to focus on their studies, and then myself and the other friend went and got more contracts and moved up the chain.

So why give up on four years of uni for your business? Could you have waited six more months?

Opportunity waits for no man. In an industry that moves so quickly, we thought we’d have to move fast because if we waited six months then a new platform would have been rolled out already. We wanted to jump on the opportunity while we still could and didn’t want to lose any time at all.

What were the weaknesses you saw in these companies?

We thought what we saw with these companies was very transactional. They were trying to map customer spend over a three or four year cycle. So what happened is that they would get customers to spend on hardware, and then not focus on the customer until they needed to buy hardware again.

But we had a different approach. We wanted to partner with a client through that whole period, and thought we could do that better than the companies were doing it then. We wanted to have a long-term client/partner relationship.

Then with software, we thought we could offer some more advanced types of products than what companies were getting.

How did you begin?

We started quite small, with the goal of moving up very quickly. At this time we didn’t have a sales team, it was simply engineers selling to customers. For the five years even, we didn’t have a sales time. We had engineers go out and try to sell the services, and form the relationships with companies. We just had to put ourselves out there and say,

“We can do this better”.

And through that we got our early contracts, for Kodak, and then we won one for Cadbury.

Was it difficult being so young?

Early on, the challenges were really around just running a business. We had absolutely no knowledge, because we had just done engineering and science degrees… we had absolutely no trained business knowledge.

Recognising that, we brought in a business coach. I’m an avid reader, thirsty for knowledge, but this guy had theories on how to run your organisation. He taught me to compartmentalise, and to build structure, and scale.

Would you do the same thing again, and drop out of uni? Or would you stay on for that extra six months if you had the chance?

I believe in a bit of chaos. But I don’t think I would recommend that all people drop out of uni. I’m a big advocate of learning, and lifetime learning, because once you quit uni your education doesn’t stop.

I look at the people we are hiring, and if you’re coming into an organisation and have a piece of paper, that’s good but it’s also what you have apart from that. It’s not for everyone, but for some people they should drop out because a uni degree isn’t going to service you in the same way starting a business can.

I believe I learned everything I could from uni. But your education isn’t just a piece of paper, it’s what you learn personally and drive yourself to do. Having that degree would be nice but I learned all I needed to, and I continue to learn and soak up knowledge know.

Where are you taking the business from here?

We’ve just reached $50 million sales, and have targetted $100 million in three years. We’re going to keep pushing forward, keep innovating, and we will keep transforming. We’re focussed on growth.