René Müller Tells OutputLinks about His Strategy for Continuing Growth at GMC
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Dr. René Müller is president and CEO of GMC Software AG. GMC is based in the tiny Swiss town of Appenzell, but it is known all over the world as a key leader in printing and communications software. For our Know the CEO series, Ian Shircore, OutputLinks’ UK Country Manager, recently met with Dr. Müller to talk about him and his business.
Greetings, René. I recently reviewed a 2003 OutputLinks “Entrepreneurial Spirit” profile of you, which talked about your life and the early days of your transformation of GMC. That was a great story, but things have moved on a long way since then. Can you bring us up to date on what’s happening now, in 2011?
Ian, it’s a great pleasure to speak with you and share all that has happened recently for me and GMC.
Since that 2003 interview, GMC has grown to be a global technology supplier with offices in all the major countries of the world. The last year has been excellent. We had 30 percent growth in the US, in dollar terms, with Asia Pacific almost as good.
We’ve carried on growing and we have around 320 people right now. There are big plans for this year, so that will soon be 360 or 370.
What do you feel is the major factor for your continued success?
I have a very clear strategy in place. It’s something I call the Three Ps strategy – Passion, Perfection, and Performance. And it guides everything we do.
People need to love what they’re doing. You can see the passion in our team just from the number of awards we’ve been receiving over the last three or four years. You can see that the people we have want to move forward through innovation. They want to do better – all the time. That’s passion.
Then there’s performance, and that’s driven GMC right from the start. We were just a very small Swiss company at the beginning and the only way to survive was to differentiate ourselves. My differentiation was always to be best of breed. We always wanted to do everything better than the others. We were trying to have better quality and better speed than everybody else. Not just speed to print, but also response times. When people look at their display screens, they want to see all the information they need immediately. These performance aspects became an excellent differentiator of our capabilities.
There’s also the reliability side of performance. Way back in 1999, I started investing a lot of money towards building products based on the CMMI standard. Actually, I didn’t like it at all then, as everything was controlled so tightly and the processes were so strict. But it has paid off very well, because today our software bug density is at the level of military software, which is much more demanding than the standard for commercial software. Few people know or care about that, but it makes our support team's life much easier and it makes customers’ lives much easier too. Because the product is very stable, it doesn’t break down and it’s totally reliable. That’s a long answer to your initial question, I know, but that Three Ps philosophy has been essential for us.
And that is the strategy you have stuck to?
Ah, yes, but it’s not just me. Everybody in the company understands the Three P strategy and that’s really been the key to survival and continuing growth.
How has that happened, especially in poor economic times, when many companies are busy just trying to hang on? You must have been doing a lot of things right.
The past few years of the world financial crisis have been a very interesting time. Just to be able to survive and keep on growing through the recession has been very satisfying, and it’s obviously been good for our competitive position. Compared with a lot of other companies we did extremely well. We didn’t have to let anybody go for economic reasons and we were able to manage the world financial crisis well.
Your original vision led you to transition GMC from a little hardware integration company to a global leader in digital print related software. What is your latest vision?
My latest vision is to transition GMC into a full customer communications resource. The digital printing revolution was a key factor in my software vision when I bought GMC. This new vision is in response to another revolution. And it’s here now. Although digital printing is still a growing segment, there is now a huge movement into electronic delivery of bills and statements.
This offers the huge advantage that the customer can just pay, immediately, with one or two clicks. It will be hard for print service providers to survive if they don’t offer electronic delivery alongside paper publishing. But the interesting thing is that they can get the same profit margin, if not more, from distributing documents electronically as they can get from printing them. They might have to change their production volumes, but in terms of margin, they can be better off. And online delivery is where future growth will be coming from.
So you are helping your customers, the print service providers, transition to electronic delivery.
Absolutely. It is our responsibility to help our customers meet their customers' electronic delivery requirements. We are also helping them enhance the relationship with their customers with tools like self-service portals to allow 24/7 interaction. Printers are under extreme cost pressures, while at the same time having to add new technology and increase the number of services they provide. GMC's job is to help them succeed today as well as the future.
Tell us more about GMC’s transition to Customer Communications Management.
We are working in three areas. One is our traditional bread and butter area of document composition, or dynamic publishing, as some analysts call it. That would include batch printing and interactive and on-demand publishing – though when we say publishing these days, that includes a lot of multi-channel distribution as well.
The second, newer, area is marketing automation, which is all about providing campaign management through tools like self-service web stores.
And the third area is customer analytics, where we’ve developed a very powerful survey engine that makes it easy to measure and analyze customer satisfaction and customer preferences and also allows us to do some soft profiling.
What innovations do you have planned for this customer analytics area?
Well, this customer analytics engine of ours has been in development for a year and a half and has now begun to work on live data for the first time.
We have some fantastic pilots, with outstanding results. I’m totally delighted with the results and I think this is going to be a boom area, because it will enable our customers, the print service providers, to add a lot of value by knowing the end-customer much better.
Given the speed of change in the industry, the requirement for tools like this will probably be upon us before we know it. In the meantime, my customers are gradually shifting their focus of interest from the traditional fast, reliable batch production engine to GMC’s new flagship product,
PrintNet Interactive.
This is a web-based correspondence system. It allows customer service letters and other documents to be created within a controlled process that ensures compliance and branding requirements are met and then sent automatically for multi-channel output. I’m particularly proud of the new device detection capability we have built into this. It automatically works out if the electronic output is going to a cell phone, an iPad, or another tablet device and then adjusts the picture or information shown to suit the size and resolution of that particular screen.
That’s a nice thing to have. With all the traveling people do these days, they can’t always afford to wait for the paper version. They need to be able to see documents presented on a phone or an iPad. We all want to be able to read whatever’s important without waiting.
And is it possible to look further ahead and see what other developments will become important in the future?
Not always, but you can spot some of the opportunities. The next area that GMC is exploring is the potential of pattern-based strategies and contextual information. This involves drawing on data about a customer’s location, preferences, friends and consumption patterns and analyzing it to offer a consumer or a business user more relevant choices and suggestions. Used correctly, that could offer all kinds of exciting possibilities. Used clumsily, or for less benign purposes, it could be quite scary.
That’s a very interesting project, but it will rely on capturing a huge amount of information from many sources before you can start to find the patterns that matter. You need to be able to connect to all the free information that’s available, and tap into the social media as well.
Nobody’s there yet, so that’s a project that will certainly keep us busy for a few years to come.
Are acquisitions one of the growth strategies you are contemplating?
We survived the recession in much better shape than many of our competitors, so we will be able to carry on growing strongly. Last year saw nearly 30 percent volume growth across key markets like the US and Europe, and we are already planning to add another 50 staff this year.
Changes in the industry, coupled with the financial crisis, have created new opportunities and we haven’t ruled out using acquisitions to accelerate our international expansion.
There’s a long list of people interested in working with us. I’ve been looking at various companies that would like to find a partner, after the financial crisis.
Congratulations on the new vision and direction, as well as your continued growth around the world.
As we close, please share what you think are the primary factors that motivate a senior executive to make the decision to buy from GMC?
Well, it’s that Three Ps strategy again – Passion, Perfection, and Performance – and the way that pays off for our customers.
I suppose it’s also the way we’re always reinvesting back into GMC and its products. I haven’t really said this before, but I’ve been looking at various companies to acquire and I’m just amazed at how much money management takes out of some companies. Then, when there’s a crisis, it makes it so much harder to survive. So, I think the fact that GMC is financially solid and constantly reinvesting in the business helps when someone is making the decision to buy.
And there’s one more factor that should make potential customers feel comfortable buying from GMC. They can always call me. Direct. I will talk to them myself, day or night. I’m here for them. And I’m certainly having far too much fun to retire any time soon.
René, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, experiences and wisdom with our OutputLinks global community.
Know the CEO is based upon the presumption that decision makers prefer buying from people they know. As such, this Series presents the background and principles of CEOs leading key suppliers to the print and mail industry.
This issue of Know the CEO introduces you to:
Dr. René Müller, president and CEO of GMC Software AG
For this Know the CEO segment, Andy and Julie Plata, OutputLinks’ owners, share their impressions and knowledge of Dr. Müller.
Next week Ian Shircore, OutputLinks’ UK Country Manager, will present his recent interview with René Müller in part 2 of this Know the CEO segment.
Dr. René Müller is president and CEO of GMC Software AG. GMC is based in the tiny Swiss town of Appenzell, but it is known all over the world as a key leader in printing and communications software.
When Dr. René Müller bought GMC in 1994, it wasn’t even a software company. It was a hardware integration services supplier for the printing industry and it was not in the best of shape.
So it was going to be a challenge to get the company sorted out and heading in a new direction.
We met Dr. René Müller (or just René, as he is known to his clients, associates and friends) almost 10 years ago. In that time we have come to know him as a great family man, horseman, polo player and international business man.
René’s grandfather, who he cites as his entrepreneurial role model, was a creative person who loved his work and had a strong vision of what he wanted to accomplish. Those are exactly the qualities we mention when we describe René to our associates.
A few facts about René Müller:
- His home is in Switzerland;
- He is married, with two adult children;
- He has a degree in physics and an MBA;
- He worked for Bain & Company, handling consulting projects in London, UK, and Germany;
- For 10 years he operated as an independent turnaround consultant in Europe and the US;
- He first came across GMC when he was hired by the company as a consultant.
People who know René describe him as a self-confident man with a vision and a strong drive for excellence in all that he does. His ability to take a high-level, conceptual view of business is matched by his ability to drill down to practical, day-to-day business operations.
When he saw the opportunity to fulfill his lifelong dream to own a company, René made an offer to buy GMC. Here was his chance to back his own skill and judgment, to pinpoint the real potential at the heart of the business, and to show that he could execute, as well as advise. After the acquisition, he quickly repositioned GMC to focus on development of software products for the digital printing market.
The rest is pretty much history. You don’t need to be all that close to the digital printing industry to know that GMC is one of the leading international players in specialist software development for this market. It has 320 employees, award-winning and profit-creating products, and thousands of enthusiastic customers in all the world’s major economies, from America to France and from China to Turkey. GMC’s products are used in the world’s largest corporations for enterprise level billing, statement, direct mail, document creation and document production applications.
When we first met René in 2002, he told us one of his goals was to bring people of different cultures together and have a company that was a mini United Nations. Today he has achieved that goal, with over 300 employees in every major country of the world. And these 300+ employees, who René describes simply as “the best”, are his greatest asset. René’s grandfather would be proud of his grandson – the creative entrepreneur who loves his work and has a strong vision of what he wants to accomplish.
As an independent business owner and committed family man operating by principles, consistently re-investing into his business while remaining easily accessible to his employees and clients around the world, René Müller is a true role model for aspiring business people.
GMC has come a long way in the last 16 years. But that’s nothing compared with René Müller's vision for the immediate future. Having successfully changed the company from a printer reseller to a super successful specialist software developer, he is already setting out to transform it again. This time his vision is to become a total communications support company, providing the software platform for the advanced customer communications management techniques that Müller’s crystal ball says his customers will need in two, three, or four years from now.
Tune in next week when Ian Shircore, OutputLinks’ UK Country Manager, will share his recent interview with René Müller to give you a chance to better “Know the CEO” of GMC Software AG.
As a valued eNews reader, we invite you to share your views and opinions on this profile or the Know the CEO series in the comments section below.
Happy day,
Andy & Julie Plata
Co-CEO’s
OutputLinks Communications Group