Feature writer Fiona Scott meets Emma Carter, a friend and a client in her PR business, who has recently taken on a new role of CEO of fast-growing managed IT provider WestSpring based in Bristol.
I’ve known Emma Carter for around a decade and we have been both clients and friends over that time – friends all of the time and clients sometimes. I do find that people like Emma are far too rare in business – she’s a woman in a senior position in STEM.
So why would I interview a friend and a client, surely that’s a biased thing to do? Well it’s not. I’m telling you the truth openly and frankly as we need more women to be given opportunities to be part of this important sector.
There’s a saying that ‘we can’t be what we can’t see’. While I’m not sure if that’s true, what is true is that if you are a woman or girl today who wants to work in a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) field, it feels much more attainable if you can see that others have done that too. This means that you may then make a choice earlier in your life to go down that route because you can see what’s possible.
We kicked off our conversation by talking about STEM and her role within it.
You’ve got quite a senior position in a STEM business. How did you get involved in tech?
I grew up in the 80s, and that was the generation where we had to do both the analogue and the digital at the same. Honestly, I fell into tech. I didn’t train in it. I didn’t study it.
It was just the nature of the changing world.
I managed to put myself in positions where I was somebody who was happy to say ‘yes’. When I was at Yellow Pages we were selling and my role was a sales job but then it transitioned into selling 118/247 when there was a deregulation of the old 192 system and then into yell.com.
The main area, for me, where tech really kicked in was at Excalibur, which was an IT and comms business based out of Swindon, and they were providing outsourced IT services and all of the associated products and services that came with that.
I’ve always understood that the tech was actually the tool to deliver the service. It’s the enabler, it’s the mechanism that something can be done through , as opposed to the centre of the conversation.
Looking back then over the last 20 or so years – how far has tech come?
The main development for me is the way that it’s become our norm now. It is completely normal to walk around 
with a device in our hand, it has music and podcasts and emails from multiple sources and a CRM and bank accounts, credit card and parking apps.
For me the journey of tech has been more about the way in which it’s been integrated into society. I think back to Walkmans. I mean, a Walkman was tech, right? I remember getting my first portable CD player and thinking I was awesome because I walked around with this CD player on a clip on my jeans.
The other thing I think that’s happened is the way it’s become a service. If you think back to the early 1990s it became pay as you go as opposed to buying the piece of kit and that’s almost normalised for a lot of people now. It’s very rare these days that you buy something, even your mobile phone or your car.
In the past we used to ‘rent’ our tv and that was often associated with being on lower income – has this changed now?
Today, often it’s not that you can’t afford to buy it. It’s just the mechanism society accepts.
I think that comes down to the sort of the culture that’s been created around consumerism of the needing it ‘now’, it’s easier to absorb something that’s £2 a month or £300 a month as a monthly thing rather than thinking I’ve got to save for it.
That need for speed, and expectation for speed, crosses into all areas of our lives. Tech has enabled us to do things quickly and we’ve come to expect that. If I transfer money to you right now, it takes three minutes and you’ve got the money. It wasn’t that long ago that we were still waiting on cheques to clear and even doing an electronic transfer could take 24 hours to arrive in the bank.
Today I’ve got friends that don’t buy cars ever, they lease, and they see it as a positive. It’s not that they don’t own something at the end of it, it’s more that they get a new car every three years. They don’t have to worry about the maintenance and all the rest of it.
It’s the same with tech. You know that paying through subscription enables you to get really good products at a price that’s affordable and scalable. This certainly opens doors for SMEs as they can consider cash flow – which we all know is a key to success.
Why do you think women are so poorly represented in STEM businesses particularly at a senior level?
I think it starts really early at school where there’s this societal expectation about the way in which girls and women develop their careers. For me the first thing is, as a society, STEM subjects still just doesn’t feel like a girl’s subject matter.
The second bit then is the expectation of what you do with your career and how you evolve. People can view ‘tech’ as something that you have to study for that you have to start in tech and evolve and that’s your career and you stay in it. There’s this whole label that you’ve got to be a geek.
Then I think the biggest thing about why people don’t make it in senior roles is the same sort of thing that affects women in other senior roles.
It’s the way in which childcare, caring and those responsibilities are still generally roles played by a female. Things have improved but it’s all still there. So there can be a gap in career that a woman has to handle that a man necessarily wouldn’t.
Then there is the perception of how do you have a senior career when you still have to juggle childcare or caring responsibilities when we get older? Things like menopause and perimenopause and generally that’s still not accommodated.
Finally, I’ve found that women often don’t have an innate drive for pushing themselves out there. For example many will look at a job description and go ‘I can’t apply for that job because I can only do eight of the ten things listed’ whereas the male gender tends to look at it and go ‘yeah, that’ll be fine. I can make that work’.
How have you managed those things in your career then, Emma because you’re a parent?
Honestly, I’ve got a stay-at-home husband. We made that choice several years ago as a couple. We were both in relatively senior careers very early on when our child came along and my husband’s employer went into liquidation (Woolworths Group).
The discussion we had as a family was that he would become the stay-at-home dad to Mars, who was four at the time. Mars is now 19 and my husband is still a stay-at-home Dad.
I mean it was a role reversal at the time. The irony is as you get more senior, the more flexibility you have around the way in which you can step out to do things such as caring. When I lost my dad 10 years ago as a senior executive I could take the time off to spend time with him.
I’ve seen friends who’ve gone through similar losses but were at a middle-management level in good jobs and they have felt bad when they needed to step out or they haven’t been able to beyond compassionate leave.
I could not have done any of this without a husband who stayed at home. It was this and my personality traits of sheer bloody determination and wanting to prove myself that have got me through to where I am today.
When you first find out what about WestSpring.
I’ve known WestSpring as a business for a while. When I was approached, I really liked the feel of the company. I took the role for two main reasons. One was the sort of the company it was and the other one was what was happening in the marketplace.
I feel like our marketplace from a managed service provider perspective, has really shrunk. You’ve got lots of people offering IT services on a very small scale and you’ve got a group of very large companies sitting at the top and they’ll have a couple of 1000 people.
I feel like the market has contracted for that mid-level and some have gone. So, companies of £2 million to £3million turnover have huge potential to grow – if they have the right ethics and culture.
The way in which the marketplace is moving was really interesting. And to me, that presents an opportunity.
My second reason was about WestSpring itself . And that was very much about how the company was created. The two founders did it after working in an IT world and they have the attitude of “we don’t like the way people treat clients, so we want to do it differently”.
With that culture, they’ve grown successfully and are able to sell, able to service, they have really good client and staff retention.
They were looking at what they can do to get to that next level of growth and that’s where I – and other team members – can add value.
The people here are fantastic people and there’s massive opportunity to develop them and their careers. There’s opportunity to work in a more strategic way with our clients. There’s an opportunity to identify new products and solutions that are working within the client base.
It’s actually really exciting to think about what’s possible at WestSpring. When I look forward over three years, that’s the bit that makes me tick. It’s the stuff I love. It’s the stuff that I can influence.
I can change things. I can implement an activity or tasks that deliver things that are going to move the company forward but not for sale, for growth.
And that was the final kind of massive tick. We don’t want to grow this business to sell it. I’m 45. I’m not looking for my exit for at least another 15 years. By the time I’m meant to retire, I’ll be 78 or something!
There’s not the pressure to grow it for the sake of sale. With that mindset, we can make good decisions, good choices to get the growth we want and that’s right for us, for the client, for our people.
It’s not all about all tech and transactions with you is it?
If you look at my career, I shouldn’t really be in tech. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a tech person I call myself a businessperson where tech is the enabler. It’s the tool, it’s the product, it’s the solution. I love it because it enables things to happen, whether it’s efficiencies, structures or processes, all the things that I like.
My own career benefitted because I had good people around me, literally from when I was in secondary school, who helped me to see beyond the expectations built around me as a result of society, my environment, my upbringing, and they encouraged me to go and learn things, find things out, try things, make mistakes and develop in different directions.
In every role I’ve been in, I’ve offered to do the same to people in that company and I do that in my outside life. I work with Young Enterprise to work with young adults, I work with a couple of charities where it’s focused on young adults. For me the people bit is the fundamental, so I get a buzz from it.
The reality is in a service industry – happy content and nourished people will deliver more. They go above and beyond for the client. They have much more personality, much more willingness to figure something out without fear of reprisal. They’re more willing to get their hands dirty, get stuck in, get involved.
The products take care of themself because you become trusted. It’s corny, but you become trusted. You become an advisor. You become part of a partnership.
It’s the personalities who make the difference.
What type of things do you do at WestSpring to keep your people happy?
It starts with the leader, so I’ll talk first about what do I do from a from a well-being point of view.
When I’m on holiday I try my best to not answer emails or the phone and I stick to WhatsApp and only if necessary. I’m trying to display the behaviour that says when you’re away, you’re away.
I’m also always self-learning. I belong to an amazing peer-to-peer coaching group in Derby, and once every six weeks, I get together with them and they hold me accountable for my own development, for my approach, how I’m feeling from a health perspective, from a fitness perspective, from a well-being perspective, and what impact that might have on people around me.
I’m willing to listen and I want to understand how things might be different or why my approach might not work. I have also trained in various areas. For example I am a mental health first aider. I specifically did that because I became aware in previous companies that the mental health first aiders were really there to support the staff, the teams and there was this sort of gap around leaders who did not have access to that kind of support.
Lastly it comes down to what do you do with the people. I don’t that there is a one fit one answer for all.
I think it is very dependent on the individual and what companies have to do is to genuinely introduce ideas or concepts or programmes, where you absolutely want them to take advantage of it.
If you do it because it’s a tick box exercise, your team can read through it. You also have to ‘mix it up’ and offer different things. You can’t just introduce something and five years later the package is exactly the same.
Everybody wants pay rises. We pay well at WestSpring, but there’s only so much we can pay. So how do we help them through the challenges of something like a cost of living crisis? How do they talk about money? How do they handle money? What resources are out there to be able to assist with that?
Also, we’ve got an ageing population, so you know people that I’ve been working with that suddenly need advice on what you do from a pension point of view. How do you pay for your kids to get through university?
We employ a lot of young people here. How do they get on the housing market? The reality is many of them can’t. Unless a family member dies or a house gets sold somewhere. How do they adapt and evolve?
Also you can’t then criticise when people don’t use what’s on offer. Some things are there for when it’s needed and that’s the critical bit.
I did notice that for you, it’s not about forcing people to take part in well-being initiatives.
Every month we have a company update and that lasts for two hours and everybody is expected to be there.
Once a quarter we then have a company event and evening out and it can be very basic like bowling. It could be a bit more complex, you know, and we’ve done quiz nights.
It could be a very structured thing, like cookery classes. It’s the last Friday of the quarter and everybody know it exists, and you can take part if you wish.
We do two big events in the year – one in the summer and one at Christmas and that’s for families and partners. In the past we’ve been on ski trips or visited capital cities on a weekend break. That’s getting more difficult as we get bigger. So, we’re having to find our way through.
What does that look like moving forward we don’t know but what we do know is we want it to be a big event.
We’ve found people do come.
What does WestSpring’s ideal client look like?
We’re industry agnostic, right? So, it doesn’t matter what marketplace our clients operate in. The key bits are they are genuinely interested and want to use tech as a way of engaging people, improving processes, creating efficiencies, protecting the business from cyber risk, all that sort of thing.
They must see it as a true element of the way in which their business operates and how it can improve and enhance operations.
This is different from those organisations which see tech as a necessary evil. We don’t work with clients with the mindset of ‘we have to have laptops’ and it’s a commodity or a transaction.
To genuinely do something in a business, tech can be transformational.
We work in sectors including recruitment, engineering, consultancy, health, leisure centres, private schools to name a few. It doesn’t actually matter, it’s more about the behaviour.