Purplebricks owes its IT strength to a team originally recruited from Ukraine.
Chief Information Officer David Kavanagh, in a revealing interview with Computing magazine, says that when he joined in January 2103, he found that the platform was only “sort of working”.
He said that when he took a deeper dive, he found it was not fit for purpose.
He said that three years ago, Purplebricks was little more than an idea, with the two founders, brothers Michael and Kenny Bruce, being “not very technical”.
He said: “We looked to build on what we had, and myself and CEO Michael took a trip to Ukraine and hired a team to get us further forward, and at the same time we started recruiting for an in-house team within the UK.”
Kavanagh said that the firm initially hired technical staff from Ukraine because it was increasingly tough to find good people in the UK because of the competition for IT talent.
Purplebricks hired six people in Ukraine and Kavanagh and other senior members of Purplebricks’ team spent a week with them and did their due diligence.
He believes they did a good job of getting Purplebricks’ platform where the company wanted it to be, but since September 2013 the firm has been recruiting technical staff in-house.
“We’ve had no staff turnover at all since we started recruiting – no one has left since we’ve had five in-house staff,” he says in the interview.
The company now has 26 people in its IT team, and only one in Ukraine. It is now looking to bring in six more IT staff in the first quarter of 2016.
In the interview, Kavanagh also says that he had to enlighten the founders on what the company needed.
He said: “I had to have very confrontational and direct conversations because when I met them, their expectations of when we could go live with the platform were wrong because of their past experiences, and they had spent a lot of money on nothing, so I was coming into a very broken environment,” he says.
“Michael ran a law firm, Kenny ran estate agents, they were very successful and brilliant people.”
The article ends by saying that now that the company is valued at half the market capitalisation of Foxtons, there will be more attention paid to its platforms, apps and website than before.
The interview is here:
Yesterday shares in Purplebricks, floated at £1 just before Christmas with the company valued at £240m, finished the day at 78p.
Why on earth would PB need 26 IT workers? What are they doing all day? We have 1 IT expert as it was built correctly and maintained 100%.
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I notice their CIO refers to the Bruce brothers abilities in the past tense ‘they were very successful and brilliant people’.
If I were a shareholder seeing my investment dropping 24% in value in less than a month, I’d have preferred to have seen that comment before the flotation!
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#PURPLI #callcentreagent I might buy at 50p just for a laugh…… only one at 50p mind you, as I reckon putting money on Man U winning the prem is safer! 😉
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Come on who’s the Utd fan who hit dislike! Could be one of my lot in fairness 😉
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Bear in mind no-one turned up to the party, the sandwiches are starting to curl and the fizzy pop has gone flat, you might find the dislike is more to do with frustration and anger at your hostile, paltry, offer for the firm.
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