Ian Herbert, Vistair

I had started a previous business making interactive videos and one of the projects was making crew briefing videos for British Airways, which was really successful. When the civil aviation authorities introduced a requirement for airlines to manage their documentation properly British Airways rang me up and asked if I would take a look at doing this for them. I said no because I didn’t really want to get involved in documents; it seemed complex and uncrackable. So they went off and spent a fortune with companies that didn’t really know what they were doing and then eventually came back to me and said, we are not getting on very well with this, would you have another look? So I did and I started the business in 2001.

I invested my own savings and vowed that I would never borrow from a bank or take an investor on board, because both events had caused me a huge amount of stress in a previous business. It was a big risk because I had two young children but I started building the business in a very prudent and cautious way. My first client was Qatar Airways which had just bought a load of Airbus aircraft and didn’t know how to manage the documents. Suddenly we had a client which was providing cash flow to cover the wages bill and we started to leverage that.

Finding the right people to work with, who could get involved with the business and understand it.

We are a technology company and have invented a novel way of making systems deliver documentation to devices, so that if someone revises a document, only the changes to the document are delivered, rather than the whole document. It was quite a complex nut to crack and we have cracked it. The beauty of it is it gives us a clear differential to other providers and for users is extremely responsive and fast, and people enjoy using them. We have created a world beating technology.

The pandemic has been devastating for our client base, but we produce technology that actually saves airlines money because it makes it cheaper for them to manage documents. Before Covid hit, our product was a hard sell because airlines didn’t really need to reduce their costs, but the pandemic has made them focus on cutting costs and so we have taken on several new clients and also expanded into a new market of engineering documentation, which we had been trying to do for a long time.

People underestimate the level of complete commitment that you have to have if you start your own business. You have to put everything into it to make it successful. The levels of stress - and elation – can be overwhelming.

My mistakes have always been around trusting people too much. For example I am not hard enough when it comes to dealing with my sales team. Sales people will always tell you that things are ok, even when they are not, and I always end up trusting them because it is easier to do that than having to let people go.

When we show people our product, we never exaggerate what it can do; we always tell the truth and tell it as it is. That has stood us in really good stead because then people trust us.

Get a really good mentor. If you can find yourself somebody who has done it before, who is genuine and keen to help, it is massively invaluable.

​Resilience.