Ram Gupta, Managing Director of the Chamber’s Technology Partner Nybble.co.uk Ltd, talks about building his business and serving the community.
Being awarded the British Empire Medal in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours List crowns a long list of achievements for Ram who has become a leading figure in the business community in both Lancashire and Greater Manchester. Ram has taken Nybble from a start-up launched in a back bedroom with a credit card to a multi-million-pound, award-winning company that now trades internationally. Over the years Nybble has adapted to huge changes in the technology market, evolving from a retailer with a chain of shops to a Managed Services Provider (MSP) helping clients deal with all the cyber opportunities and threats that face businesses today.
Family Values
The secret of Nybble’s success can be traced back to the values Ram learned in his childhood. He describes himself as growing up in poverty with his three brothers and parents in a two-up, two-down, which meant four of them sharing a room while his parents slept in the other room. His father came to the UK from India as a qualified barrister but finding that he could not practise in this country, he ended up working as dispatcher delivering groceries. Ram’s mother could not speak English but communicated through her love of laughter and her ability to make other people laugh.
Coming from a poor background taught Ram “appreciation and humility” but also gave him the drive to improve his situation and instilled in him the values that remain at the heart of Nybble.
Looking back at his early life, Ram says: “You know that there’s no option but to move on in life, but you move on with the right values. When people say they have nothing, I don’t believe that because they equate that in monetary terms. In monetary terms as a family we had nothing, but we had everything. There was a lot of love in that family. A lot of love was given, not only to the family, but to friends and to anyone who entered the home whether we had something or we didn’t. We gave them what we had and we continued that with Nybble.”
The Customer is King
Surprisingly for someone who has enjoyed such long success a tech entrepreneur, Ram never intended to work in IT and originally planned to be an auditor. After graduating with a degree in accounts from UCLAN, he had an interview in Manchester with Arthur Anderson, which was one of the big six accounting firms at the time. Ram was offered a job Arthur Anderson but as this would have meant moving to Australia he had to turn it down due to his responsibilities in the UK.
With his dream of becoming an auditor gone, Ram took an IT job in Warrington and it was his personal experience of how the industry operated that led him to launch his own business at the age of 24 in 1998.
He says: “The reason Nybble was founded was that as a procurer of IT when I was working for that company I had an horrendous experience and many horrendous experiences. The cost of entry for IT was very high and the customer service levels were very low. Everyone was jumping on the bandwagon – it was a case of just sell people anything you want.”
Ram’s inspiration for what type of business Nybble should be came from the fantastic experience he had as a 14-year-old customer of Richer Sounds. Having caught a train to the company’s Leeds store to buy some cassettes he found they had none in stock. The manager of the branch at the time drove him to Manchester so he could get the cassettes. The fact he received such first-class treatment for such a small purchase stayed with Ram and made him vow that the customer would be at the heart of everything Nybble did.
“What I wanted to do was transfer that Richer Sounds experience into IT and that’s why Nybble was formed,” he explains. “Nybble when it started was very much a retail business. We found a niche in refurbished IT. We wanted to be the boutique store for IT where if you walk in you get the smell of coffee, you get leather sofas and somebody in a suit as an IT professional talking to you about your IT requirements.
“The customer is king philosophy is actually why we started Nybble, so it comes at the very core of what the business is. My mottos is that ‘we’re just nice people who happen to do IT’.
“At what point is IT too expensive? When IT is delivered badly, it becomes an expense. If you deliver IT properly, if you give a good customer experience then not only do you retain customers, you get further services, you get recommendations, and that’s how Nybble’s grown. We’ve grown through our customer experiences – we just happen to do IT.”
Evolution
Focusing on the customer experience served Nybble well and it grew to have several stores around the UK, but changes in the market and the decline of the High Street led to it re-inventing itself as a Managed Services Provider in 2009.
Ram says: “We were very limited with what we could do within our capability as a retail organisation. When we came out of retail we kept some of our customers that relied on us, which is the philanthropic side of Nybble, but we evolved as a business because we had to. If we were still doing now what we were doing 30 years ago we could not exist. If Blockbuster, for example, had adopted the Netflix model, it would still exist today. When Netflix approached Blockbuster about this online offer, Blockbuster said it would never happen. Eighteen months later, Blockbuster went bust.”
Since the move from retail, Nybble has continued to evolve as a business, adapting to new technologies and changing customer needs.
“It was a painful thing for us to leave retail as we enjoyed it, but we could see what was coming with the online revolution,” Ram adds. “Nybble has taken not one, but several evolutions. I would say that we evolve as a business every single day because if we don’t evolve then somebody out there will evolve quicker than us and they’ll provide a better service to our customers.”
He describes the last couple of years as being a “bit of a roller coaster” for Nybble and its customers due to the adoption of new technologies, saying: “There’s been an IT revolution that we might not see again for another 20 years.”
Ram adds: "We focus on expanding our customers' businesses in every way and respond proactively to their requirements. From IT to new LED screens, digital signage, boardroom or classroom solutions, AI solutions, Cyber to software development, we are constantly evolving as a business to ensure our customers stay ahead of the competition. Whatever your problem, Nybble has a solution, together with a strong social purpose and an incredible technical and customer success team."
At the Heart of the Community
Ram was awarded the British Empire Medal in recognition of his services to the community and community is at the heart of what Nybble does. The company’s ambition is to take as many families out of poverty as possible both through the way it employs people and the way it gives. This aim means Nybble has looked beyond its own customers to how changes in technology have affected the wider community, particularly those in disadvantaged areas. When the digital poverty gap became painfully apparent during the Covid lockdowns when working, learning and accessing services online became the norm, Nybble stepped into help.
“What happened with the pandemic was that everything went online and the need to be online became even more important, so one device wasn’t enough,” Ram says. “Digital poverty became a thing and people were suffering mental health issues, suffering lack of opportunity, lack of ambition because they didn’t have access to digital devices which gave them access to the same information that everyone else has. Digital poverty became almost as important, if not more important, as food poverty and mental poverty because it can cause both of them.”
Ram describes how those suffering from digital poverty during the pandemic were left struggling to do something as simple as make a doctor’s appointment and households with only one device had to decide whether to choose work over their children’s education. Through its digital poverty campaign Nybble initially providing 4,000 devices out of the company’s own money into the communities that were suffering digital incapability. The campaign has continued over the last four to five years and thousands of devices have now been provided. In recognition of its efforts to reduce digital poverty Nybble was given a British Citizen Award (BCA).
Nybble’s efforts to reduce digital poverty is part of the company’s overall ethos of what Ram calls “purpose beyond profitability”, which reflects Ram’s philosophy that a successful life is about far more than moving up the career ladder and making more money.
“We believe that the gift of giving is for the giver,” he says. “We go through our entire life what I call ‘suffering our success.’ We get a job. We’ve been dying to get that job. We achieve that. Then when we’re in the job, we don’t enjoy it, we suffer it, thinking it’s long hours, it’s this, it’s that. You get to the top of the tree, you’re earning loads of money, you’ve got lots of people working for you, but we don’t enjoy that success, we suffer it, because most success factors are judged on balance sheet and profit. The problem with judging success on balance sheet and profit alone is who do you compare yourself with because there’ll always be someone who is more successful than you.”
Ram believes the only way to escape the cycle of dissatisfaction that so many people experience is to share your success and to re-discover the way we enjoyed life as children.
“I liken it to a child in a playground,” he explains. “The child is enjoying the process of swinging. It doesn’t know where that swing is going to take them but it’s enjoying that process. They’re the most successful people, so I run my business like a child.
“The only way to enjoy success is by sharing it. It’s by enjoying that gift of giving. If you can learn to enjoy that gift of giving, you become a more successful person internally and externally and that’s what Nybble does – we enjoy giving. We give to so many different charities, support so many organisations and we will continue to do that.
“A lot of our growth is driven by being more successful in that area. Of course, you need balance sheet and profit, but you don’t need to have the best balance sheet and profit to be successful.”
Ram’s aim is to ensure that all of Nybble’s employees share in the company’s success and better their own lives. With this in mind, Nybble has employees from all different backgrounds and diversities, including homeless people.
He says: “My ambition for Nybble is driven by the people in the business. Everyone in Nybble has a story. Our most capable engineer used to be a carer. You might think, why would you employ a carer in a technical role? But carers are people who are caring and work incredibly hard – I can’t teach them that but I can teach them IT. We take caring, hard-working people, who want to better their lives, and turn them into IT people. That is my ambition and to fulfil that ambition, we need to grow the business.”
AI and Business
Discussing the development of AI, Ram says people have to think carefully about how AI can benefit their business and get the right advice. He likes AI to earlier developments such as websites and apps which businesses rushed to get without thinking how they could best use them.
“They’re using AI because everyone else is using it and they’ll get left behind if they don’t use it,” he explains. “That’s no reason to use AI. It’s very important with AI to understand it and the only way you can understand it is by education. What we offer at Nybble is that education around AI. To tell you what AI is. To understand your business and to tell you how you can use AI effectively in your business. Whether it be a voice chatbot, whether it be an automated AI customer, that’s doesn’t matter, that’s the end solution. The education part around AI is very important. It’s not there to replace the human being, it’s there to enhance the capability of what a human being should be doing.”
Looking back to the first evolution of computers, he says: “Adding up 50 numbers – is that a good use of human time? It’s not because there’s something that can do that better. AI takes it beyond that. What you’ll find is that you’ll have more intelligent human capability and the human mind will be doing all the right things and the AI will be doing all the things a human probably shouldn’t be doing in their business. It will be the most hard-working and best employee your business can have. And the beauty of AI is that it’s available at the same cost to the corporate and the single person business. If you want to scale your business and run it like a corporate business, even if you’re a one-man band, then AI is the way to get there.”
Challenges and Opportunities
Ram believes one of the main problems currently facing the UK is that our infrastructure is so far behind where it should be. He says that while successive governments have made statements setting out where the country should be, it is what happens on the ground that makes the biggest difference. He points out that something as simple as a train journey could be transformed through the use of technology and benefit the economy.
“When you’re on a train to London, for example, or to Manchester, you should, as a basic human right, be able to work for that entire journey and have good wi-fi, good connectivity,” he says. “We should automatically take that for granted. When that doesn’t happen, the cost to the economy is absolutely massive. Imagine productivity if you had that connectivity, if you had those capabilities. It would be massive, the UK would be a hugely productive society. If you can get the work done while you’re travelling or in public spaces, then you don’t need to do that work when you get home, so you have a better work-life balance as well.”
He fears that without investment in infrastructure, data centres and connectivity, the UK will get left behind. He also highlights the need to fund incubator hubs and aspirational hubs for young people because they are the future.
But despite lack of investment, Ram remains confident in the ability of British businesses to overcome the challenges ahead. “If we have enough confidence in ourselves, in our own capabilities and in the capabilities of the beautiful businesses in the UK. Then no matter what infrastructure we do or don’t have, we’ll still flourish.”
Sound Advice
Ram’s many years in business have made him take the long-term view rather than be influenced by whatever is currently hitting the headlines. So, although businesses face rising costs this year, Ram warns it is a mistake to base decisions solely around the current level of taxation.
He adds: “If you’re making big decisions based around tax then you’re probably doing your business a massive injustice because everything is temporary, as the world spins that will also spin out. Your decisions have got to be sound business decisions and if that involves a bit of tax, then great, but not because of tax. If you need a member of staff, don’t not take a member of staff on because of National Insurance - just recruit differently. That’s what we do. We recruit very differently, so we’ve always got an available person we can take on.”
And whatever challenges may lie ahead, Ram remains optimistic about the outlook for the UK in general and Greater Manchester in particular.
“You are in the most exciting era of business that’s ever been seen,” he says. “The opportunities presented out there are far beyond anyone’s capability currently, so make yourself capable. Make sure you realise what the opportunities are and make sure you’ve got the education that sits behind that and most importantly have no fear.
“The beauty of children is that you can ask a child to do anything and a child will just say ‘yes’. Every time you tell a child that you can’t do something you pour a bit of concrete in their mind. So we become 20/30-year-olds with loads of concrete in our minds knowing what we can’t do, not what we can do. So break that concrete out of your mind. When you run your own business you are the master of your own ship. So, if someone says to you ‘go to the moon’, say ‘let’s go!’ but then find out how to get there. Because the sky’s not your limit, the sky’s just the beginning.”
Ram is especially proud of Nybble’s partnership with Greater Manchester Chamber and what it contributes to the local economy and business community.
“I think Manchester is probably the incubator of the world. In terms of talent, in terms of business and in terms of opportunity,” he says. “The Chamber is the furnace because the Chamber is the one that provides the gateway to opportunity and we couldn’t be prouder to be not only a member of the Chamber but to be a strategic partner, because when you’re a strategic partner it means you’re working together and I couldn’t imagine working with a better team than Greater Manchester Chamber. The Chamber is an ecosystem and being part of that ecosystem means that the bees that come out of Manchester are going to populate the world and they’re going to bring the honey back into Manchester.”
Exclusive support for Chamber members
Chamber members can get an exclusive free of charge review of IT Services from Nybble.
The no-obligation audit is designed to deliver an unbiased, risk-free review of your current IT provision and also offers the opportunity to discuss your future requirements.
To book your free IT service review, email benefits@gmchamber.co.uk
For more information about Nybble, visit www.nybble.co.uk