Andy Kyiet

How does a combination of bespoke leather goods-making and orangutan-wrangling skills produce a data management pioneer? Not such a great leap of faith when compared to emigrating from Wembley to Sydney to establish a new life in a new world. As Andy Kyiet tells us, it’s all about his vision, perseverance and the passion he has for helping other businesses succeed.

‘Andy, what do you actually do?’

This is a question faced by Andy on an almost daily basis since 2001 when he founded Demand Flow Intelligence.

Andy’s response was: “I provide intelligence and data to companies to help them grow their business. Predominantly we’re Market Geologists designed to locate, connect with, qualify, and generate demand in your market.”

The conversation tended to continue like this:

‘Don’t companies have marketing people to do that?’

“Yes, they do, but being marketing people, they don’t necessarily have the knowledge on where to find the organisations which meet their ideal customer profile. Having marketing people spending time guessing where a market might be, can be very costly.”

‘So, you do all the Market research then…?’

The questions went on and on; there seemed to be no end to them, and those asking the questions seemed no wiser after he’d finished explaining it. Andy needed an answer that simplified what he did, while still getting across the importance of it.

According to Andy, “the essence of marketing is to do something unexpected and that really came home to me when I noticed a series of messages on the notice board of a local church.” It brought to mind that song, ‘signs, signs, everywhere there are signs, blocking up the scenery, breaking my mind’, then one day Andy noticed they were different; the signs stood out.

“The signs became funky: things like ‘Jesus is Coming, quick, everyone look busy’, ‘Christmas is coming, get in early before the rush’. It hit me that the church was doing the unexpected and it got me thinking. What would be my ‘unexpected’ to help people understand what I did and end that endless stream of questions?”

Andy’s ‘unexpected’ was to brand himself as “The Orangutan Whisperer”.

Now when people ask ‘Andy, what do you do?’, “I tell them I’m an orangutan hunter. Initially you get this quizzical look and then I begin to explain.

“I’d say, we’re basically looking for something that’s quite scarce and we’ve got to be smart about how we do it. So if you ask yourself the question ‘where do orangutans live?’ you would say the jungle.

“Great, that’s true, ‘but do they live in every jungle?’ No they don’t, so if you’re hunting orangutans you had better be sure you’re hunting in the right jungle, otherwise you would be wasting a heap of time.”

Andy continues, “Once you’ve found the right jungle, you know orangutans live in trees, but are they in every tree? Do you have time to climb every tree? You don’t have the time or the money to waste climbing every tree so you better get smarter, and pretty quick, at picking the right tree.”

Then the story becomes, “is every ape an orangutan? No! There’s a lot of different apes, and they all speak different languages. So having found the right jungle and climbed the right tree to find your orangutan you need to be able to communicate with him in a language he understands.”

But, the process doesn’t end there. “Having found them and engaged them, the next step is to qualify them. Have I got the right orangutan?”

To illustrate with another scenario, “let’s say you’re selling treehouses and the going price is ten bananas; you want to find orangutans that have ten bananas. But what if you find an ideal orangutan, but at this moment in time he’s a few bananas short? Do you cast him aside, forget about him? You’ve gone to a huge amount of effort and expense to find that orangutan.”

To further illustrate the point, Andy adds that although “he mightn’t have ten bananas today, he’s always going to be an orangutan, so the best thing to do is electronically tag him, keep track of him, and this is what I call the hidden funnel. You find someone who fits your profile, you’ve done a lot of work to engage them, so why would you forget about them just because they don’t have ten bananas today?”

Another element to the business is that “we keep track of them, we keep retrying them. In fact, we say to our clients the quickest way to find a prospect is to go through an old campaign, find people who weren’t ready at the time, but guess what? Things change, change is always guaranteed. Now they might just have ten bananas.

“So, that’s what we do.”

This unexpected analogy has helped make Demand Flow Intelligence a leader in the marketplace and set it apart from its rivals.

For Andy, “what I’ve done is bring together my three passions: marketing and market research, IT and data processing. I love data, I love looking at data and playing around with it.

“I know, I’m a weird guy, but it really does make us different. We’re IT geeks turned into marketers who also do the data stuff. We have the same DNA as our clients and that makes us unique.”

The major difference is that “we understand data, whereas the average marketing agency is perhaps more focused on being creative and having great ideas. We do that as well, but we do the execution stuff where the rubber hits the road.”

Initially, though, it wasn’t rubber, but leather that satisfied Andy Kyiet’s creative urge. “I was born and raised in North London, in Wembley. If it wasn’t for the football stadium no-one would ever have heard of the place.

“My father was a salesman for a data preparation company – in those days it was called Electronic Data Processing, EDP.”

Andy’s parents must have had a crystal ball and could see where EDP was headed. They obliged his interest in acting while he was in primary school and helped him get a number of television parts and some film work, but once he hit high school they laid down the law: ‘study son, get an education, it will take you a lot further than acting.’

He was a good son, achieved good grades and his first job out of school was with a market research company. That was going well, until he literally hit a bump in the road.

Andy recalls he “was given the job of taking a trolley full of card decks to the processing bureau, they were in a specific order which was vital to get the run done overnight. But I went over a bump and the trolley crashed on its side. The cards flew everywhere and the order was a complete mess. I tried to get them back in the right order and thought I had but when I delivered them to the processing bureau, they couldn’t do it; the order was completely out.”

That’s when Andy decided that maybe life in an office wearing a suit and tie wasn’t for him, and he looked for something totally different.

He then got a job with a leather goods manufacturer and “I was trained as a cordwainer. It’s like a cobbler, only better. Traditionally a cordwainer is a shoemaker who makes new shoes from new leather, whereas a cobbler was restricted to repairing shoes. We used to say it was like the difference between a chef in a restaurant and a cook in a hamburger joint.”

Whilst there, “I got involved in the management side of things as well and creatively it was very rewarding. But after three years I decided I really wasn’t getting intellectually stimulated and went off to North London University to do a programming course. That got me into the IT world.”

Not only did he learn programming, the course also taught Andy the value of speaking the right language – an asset that came into its own when he started Demand Flow Intelligence.

Back then it was computer languages; “I trained on Cobol which was for large-scale business applications and there was also Fortran for scientific and algorithmic applications and PL/1 (Programme Language 1), which was a third-generation programming language developed in the early 60’s as an alternative to assembler language.”

As the company Andy worked for after University was using PL/1 and Assembler, he had to learn a new language straight away. “When I started Demand Flow Intelligence, one of our key initiatives was to understand our clients’ businesses and be able to speak the right language to their prospective clients. So it’s really no different to computers, or orangutans for that matter: if you can’t speak the same language, you can’t communicate.”

There was another valuable lesson from that job; a realisation for Andy that if he was going to be in control of his life and be able to confidently look after his family, he would have to work for himself.

This option became evident through another story Andy relates. “There was this short guy working for the company, and I’m sure he’s the reason for ‘short people syndrome’. He would play pranks on new people to test their reactions. His trick was to pretend to spill coffee all over you. He had it worked out pretty well, a real coffee cup which appeared to be full, but it was paper mache made to look like coffee. He got a laugh, but I reacted differently to most.”

Having sworn at him, which wasn’t smart, Andy became aware that “he never liked me after that. I had this horrible realisation that my whole future, my pay, my rate of advancement was in the hands of this short guy with attitude and others like him. That scared me. To be dependent on somebody like that was not a nice feeling.

“After a year I got an opportunity to go freelance and jumped at it.” This proved another milestone moment in the career of Andy Kyiet: seeing an opportunity and seizing it, even if you weren’t really ready for it.

“It was the beginning of the mini-computer and this company was putting together a financial system for all of Europe and I became involved in the development of that. In hindsight what they were trying to do was really impossible; a single accounting system for the whole of Europe. I was travelling around Europe trying to get this system up and running.”

In his travels, Andy met another person which led to another opportunity, doing something similar but not on such a grandiose scale. “We started a turnkey software company specialising in this particular mini-computer platform. We were rolling out all these systems, but there was a lot of work with the software. We had to simplify it and what we actually did was automate it. We didn’t realise it at the time, but we were probably the first people to have created what’s now known as a fourth generation language.”

Opportunity poked its head up again, in fact several times over the next few years, all centred on the growth of the IT industry.

For about ten years from the early eighties the industry was growing rapidly, and Andy saw emerging markets as the industry searched for standards, servicing and support. Even a decision to invest in the intellectual property of software proved immensely rewarding.

After creating the software to manage the back office, Andy recalls that “the natural progression was to roll out technology into the hands of the field engineers. That was the very early stages of the mobility in mobile data. Indirectly it also paved the way for my move to Australia.

“In parallel to that I had another business with an Australian partner doing networked fax solutions. When we sold that company, my partner moved back to Australia.”

Not long after that, that ex-partner contacted Andy noting that mobile data technology was being used in Australia with the comment that ‘Aussies are great adopters of new technology, why don’t you have a look?’

Andy came to Australia for a week in 1994 to have a look, and thought ‘yeah this is a nice place, we should give it a go’, and “I’ve been here ever since.”

There was one more opportunity that presented itself before Andy would start Demand Flow Intelligence and, like many opportunities, it came disguised as a setback.

Andy recalls that “there was a massive downturn in the IT market around 2001. It was post Y2K, post GST and nobody had any money. I was looking at getting back to my marketing roots and I had formed the the concept of Demand Flow Intelligence and wanted to know how big my market was. I discovered the information didn’t exist at a reasonable price.”

Andy’s opportunity was confirmed when he asked people who sell forklifts, ‘how big do you reckon the supply chain market is?’ and they didn’t know – their answer was ‘huge’. ‘How many distribution centres are there in Australia?’ Again, ‘heaps!’

In looking for the answer, Andy found there were some fairly sizeable costs involved, leading him to realise “there was very little affordable intelligence. There’s a niche here to provide affordable intelligence to the average software company, particularly the local players. That’s the basis on which I founded Demand Flow Intelligence.”

The next time you’re invited to a party by Andy Kyiet, make his day: don’t bring the obligatory bottle of wine, slab of beer, or box of chocolates – bring him a bunch of bananas so he knows you understand what he does!

ADVICE

Ego can be a killer in any business and Andy’s golden tip for anyone starting their own business is to keep that ego in the back-pocket.

Today one of Andy’s favourite television programmes is Shark Tank: “it’s great fun but it becomes fairly obvious who is going to succeed and who isn’t. The thing that tends to get in the way of success is ego; people basing their decisions, their business decisions, on what they think is a good idea and ignoring advice. They play to their ego, so if you can put that aside it makes a big, big difference in terms of who you are as a person to deal with on the other side of the table.”

Andy also adds “it’s well known that if you can last three years you’ve probably got a business and if you can last five years you’ve probably got a profitable business. But it’s not just about sticking to it, and passion isn’t enough. You need to combine it with being in a niche the market needs.”

Another piece of advice Andy likes to share is to be smart about who you employ. Employees need to be on the same page as you, and need to bring something valuable to the business. “We like to employ people who’ve got experience so I guess the average age of our workforce is about fifty. These people are of enormous value.”

From an early stage in the business, “I could see there was this well of untapped people who were circumstantially out of work or needing some part-time, flexible work and they are great value. Their experience and ability to manage themselves makes a massive difference.”

Demand Flow Intelligence’s employment policy has been recognised at the highest levels. “We won the Prime Minister’s award from John Howard for encouraging and employing older Australians.”