Darren Webber, CEO of TTC joins us to explain what he means by that and why there’s a need for software companies whose sole purpose is to test software made by other companies. He also shares his career journey from picking garlic to entering the C-Suite and tells us why he thinks lazy "desk hugging" heads in big organisations are utter bullshit.

TTC is a global IT services and consulting firm based in New Zealand that helps big organisations undergo digital transformation as a competitive advantage.

BWB is powered by Oury Clark

We ready?

Let me clear my throat.

Hi, and welcome to Business Without Bullshit.

I am Andy Oriana, alongside me as my co-host Simon Walsh.

Hello Andy.

And today we are joined by the fabulous Darren Weber.

How you doing, Darren?

I'm living the dream.

Darren is to be here.

Darren is c e o of ttc.

The testing company, an IT services and consulting firm based in New Zealand, specializing in helping big organizations undergo digital transformation at a competitive advantage.

TTC is a global firm with bar branches in America, Australia, Europe, uae, and Asia.

Thanks for coming to the podcast.

It's really, really nice to see you.

So we always like to start with this question.

What is keeping you up at night?

I'll just show you things.

Obviously as startups, we've been here for a year now, so getting a presence in the market.

Obviously London, huge financial services market.

Coming in as a, essentially a startup is, is not easy.

So acquiring new clients, new brands.

So that's, that's tricky.

Lot of work around business development.

Take a step back, just briefly cuz you mentioned financial services being your customer base.

What, what, what is it you do briefly?

We test.

You test software and that's particularly, and we're really good at it and particularly important for fintechs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So obviously your software doesn't work.

The impact to the incline is pretty significant.

I always think anyone who does a startup is insane.

You are a bit more than a startup, you're a successful company, but you have taken the, uh, hospital pass as they say of uh, one Darren, one you guy to the uk and make it all happen.

And I've seen many of us come into the uk.

This is a tough market.

Yeah, it isn't it.

It is.

But.

But it's, it's kind of what I've trained for all my life.

I've worked here before.

I've worked in different geographies, Asia, you know, Europe, whatever.

This is a natural place for me to be.

I love London.

I love the, the Chancellor in Excel in probably the hardest market.

So it's kind of like, how good are you and if you're gonna test yourself and as an organization.

Yes.

We've been in the US maybe seven or eight years, obviously Australia and New Zealand, we're in Singapore.

We've opened India about nine months ago, so that's growing.

Um, uae, so this was the gap.

So we don't have Europe or uk.

You know, I'm sure there was something in the fine print I didn't read, but, um, I'm here and, and, and loving it.

But it's, it's, it is a very, very challenging, do you think more difficult than the us?

No, I think US is a pretty tricky market.

I know a lot of Kiwi companies have failed in the US and, and they've succeeded here, and maybe that's, A cultural thing.

Maybe there's something there, I'm not sure.

But, um, but the, the guy that runs the US Chris roll has done an outstanding job for, for six or seven years.

So, and that, that market's just going strengths to strength.

I mean, I've got some massive customers, uh, US National, or is he?

Kiwi?

Kiwi, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Because cuz often you'll hear sort of foreign companies, particularly Australian, New Zealand companies, will put a US national in, um, to kind of help kind of bridge some of those cultural differences.

So really interesting that your guys are, and I think in certain geographies that's really important.

Yes.

I mean, when we're working, doing work in France, we obviously native speakers, so you've gotta get French people.

Yeah.

In, in, in Singapore, the guy that's running Singapore, he's been in that market for a very long time, so, um, obviously the guy that runs India, he's Indian, so there's certain markets, so thinks that we, the guy that runs, um, Australia is English.

I was about to say, the thing that we share is that Australia and New Zealand and the UK and arguably maybe Canada, It's the few markets that you could send a salesman, cross border, you can send someone, yeah.

A cult, a culture.

Certainly Australia, New Zealand, or uk you know, something like Simon, I'm quite passionate about.

They're, they're, they're very close and it upsets me that there's a lot of UK people are like Australia, what?

Like, or New Zealand, what, you know, and, and, and I mean, It particularly works, it's like forever for whatever differences that sometimes UK or British Australian people may think, whether it's bloody palms or you know, Kiwis may feel, because Kiwis are quite, quite, it's always it's sports related.

Always.

Yeah.

But underneath it, we work together incredibly well.

Yeah.

But I think, but I think if you look kind of, you're in New Zealand, Australia here, you certainly in Australia and New Zealand, there've been English people or poms in and out for kind of centuries, and That's right.

Same here.

So I think sort of, you know, to some extent, even though we're all different, there has been kind of a quite a good merging of the three cultures.

I think it's tighter.

Yeah.

I just think it's tighter and it goes back a few hundred years and we've mostly forgiven the English, so we, we are moving on.

Darren, how many people do you have globally?

I think it's 400.

Amazing.

So it's, it's grown quite a lot in the last year.

So I think we've, in the last six or seven months, I think India's pushing 50 now.

So that's given it a nudge And, and is the bulk of your hiring for, I guess, Rare tech resource in India or you hiring tech resource in each each of their market that's you operating?

Yeah, I mean New Zealand's gone ballistic from, from what I'm seeing with the hiring there.

So that that's obviously, you know, local New Zealand people, um, US is always growing cuz it's just a big market.

And obviously with the India team kicking on supporting those geos then that, that's really been the growth.

But it's engineers, it's it's automation engineers, it's test engineers, it's smart engineering.

Second.

So what we're talking about is a company that comes in and tests software.

Yes.

So software companies, test software.

What do you, what do you mean you're testing software?

Software doesn't work a lot.

There's a whole industry.

There's millions and millions and millions of people who are quality engineers or software engineers exist because soft software doesn't do what it says on the turn.

And particularly when you integrate it with something.

Or multiple integrations with multiple products.

Well then you've gotta keep up.

And then they all, they update and then, yeah, and you've gotta retest all of that.

Or you're taking the use cases and you're going, okay, well this is what you say it's gonna do.

We're gonna test to see whether it, that's what it does.

And often it doesn't.

Do they know it's not doing it cuz they're not getting what they, sometimes there are limitations.

So you within your, if you're a software development company and you can, you build a product.

It's got to fit into multiple landscapes.

So all your customers are come, gonna have a different landscape, a different environment.

So plugging that in, you can't always test all those variations.

So it's only when you get into a client environment and plugging it into everything.

And you might have, you know, banks will have, for example, uh, they could have four or 5,000 systems.

Asset management firms might have a hundred different applications or systems, even us.

So it's pretty complicated stuff, and you're talking an end to end transaction flow and every single point along that, the data has to be correct.

It has to do the right thing, it has to calculate the right thing, and at the end, the customer experience has to be good.

But hang on a second.

You go in and test it.

I mean, a, how do you test it?

And then B, you test it so it doesn't work.

And then they go, all right, thanks very much.

Oh yeah.

A lot of our job is, can you fix it?

We don't fix it.

Can you just identify what, sorry.

So we, we, we will tell you your baby's ugly and we'll give you some recommendations on where you baby might, it's about time someone did, might look to fix it, but we don't fix code that goes back to a development team.

So we'll, we are essentially identifying our issue.

And how are you working this out?

Is this automated?

This is a man with a spanner and a hammer.

Uh, it's all, it's all, we automate as much as we can.

That's the future.

It's been that way for 23 years.

So you write a program to software to test software.

You say, oh, you do this, this, and this, and then you write an automated thing to do this, this, and this, and see what software outcome.

Outcome software.

Yep.

And then you highlight auditors.

No, we do assessments.

We don't call them audits.

Soon as you say the word audit, people get pucker up.

Right?

So you don't want that?

No.

So we do assessments, which says you might want to look at certain things.

You know, you've got some challenges in this area, you've had some issues.

It's probably, we do a bit of a root cause analysis, impact assessment, whatever, and we'll tell you that's because you haven't tested that part of the system.

It's causing that problem for your customer.

Therefore, we'll go and do it and sort it out, but we won't fix it or go back to the vendor developer, whoever it is, they'll fix it.

So there's a.

Independence between that.

So we're not marking, they're not marking.

They must love you.

These, no, no.

These ccs, they're software developers not tested.

Have you heard about ttc?

The fcs?

But you know, ultimately it's about the end customer experience.

So if you are selling a product or service, To someone in the market.

It needs to work, it needs to be fit for purpose.

And, and these test scripts, you, you write, do they, do they emulate the end-to-end thing or do they just kind of go, okay, well this little test script will test this little bit of it and this little bit will test that bit?

Both.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you have unit tests or system level tests or integration tests or performance tests or, or whatever, so, so they're all, and TDC will do the whole gamut of that.

We don't generally do unit testing, which is the lowest level of testing.

The devs that do that, but we'll do everything else.

But I was just gonna think if, if a banker's got, you know, kind of four or 5,000 different kind of integration points, it must mean that there's a kind of massive kind of responsibility on you guys if you are kind of doing end-to-end testing on something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and again, a lot of it is regulatory.

So you'll have, you know, that you need to prove that what you said you've done, you've done, you have to have evidence.

So yeah, it's, it's serious stuff.

Um, and, you know, businesses can get closed down or whatever because, you know, software doesn't work.

But also just thinking about it, like if you are, if you've got your own software to test, you must be developing software.

So you've got to have your own software tested, but then, Test other people's software.

It's kind of almost like this Russian doll of testing, isn't it?

It is a little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the products we use are best practice.

The sort of top Gardner quadrant software products that are, have, have had installations, you know?

What do you mean the products you use to test?

So, so, so software test.

Tools, but, but that's what they would say about the other products, wouldn't they?

They say, oh, well these products, the software we use is the top grade, you know, class A.

But it's been fairly robustly tested across, well, I think, I think the principle is actually this, is that it's easier to tell if something's wrong than to get it right.

So in essence, if you write a piece of software that's gotta do some stuff, it's easier to write something to check whether it did that.

Then it is the right thing to do that thing just, but, but also the people using the tools or programming the tools of its open source, they do know what they're doing.

And you know, do you find, these days when you look at software, the majority is open source?

Is that, is that where it's heading or not?

It's certainly huge.

Globally.

Open source is massive, but again, proprietary tools, um, certainly have their place.

We have some really strong partnerships with, with vendors that have proprietary tools that are best of breed.

They're, they're absolutely brilliant.

Some companies want open source tools.

It's just a different model.

Business Without Bullshit is brought to you by Ari Clark.

Straight Talking Financial and legal advice since 1935.

You can find us@ariclark.com.

What do you think is bullshit in business?

There's a few things, I guess.

Um, one of the things that I've sort of witnessed over my career is people occupying.

A seat when maybe someone much more capable could be doing that role and they hang on for dear life.

And, um, you know, you meet with them and you're kind of thinking, yeah, there's a, there's a village missing an idiot here somewhere.

How do we try and work with this guy knowing that.

They're not interested in moving the dial forward.

So those characters in, in influential roles who really just keep the desk occupied.

I, I find that quite sad.

I'm not sure I understand you fully.

Yeah.

So say it a different way.

So, Meeting with a senior person that has no interest in doing interesting stuff for their organization.

They're literally no vision.

No vision, literally there to eat their lunch.

They're not gonna move the improve things.

They've done the same role for the X period of time and, and it probably hurts your organization ultimately is, do you find that something you see in big businesses more?

Because I mean, yes.

Yeah.

A hundred.

In large organizations where you've got people that are just, just sort of sitting there.

So I guess in your line of work, yeah, you, you, you are kind of coming across executives in certain organizations who are technically your clients.

You're trying to help them do a better job or their software do a better job and they've just got no interest in actually it do doing anything better.

Bigger companies, you get the greasy.

And the gre.

I know it cuz I've never worked in a big company, but people come and work here from big companies.

I find it really weird how they act cuz the greasy pole is you have to promote yourself.

You have to play a political game, you have to be in the right place at the right time.

You have to know chat two and all of that shit to get up the pole.

And then that's the only way of getting up the pole of these big companies.

So the fucking assholes rise up the pole and that's got nothing to do with the responsibility that you should put someone at the top with the fucking vision.

Who's brilliant with people, basically a brilliant, you know, team communicator.

You know, I think I, I agree.

This is where we're gonna ask you a list of questions to get to know you a little better.

Darren, get to know the inner Darren, you have five to 10 seconds per question.

Yeah, no dicking about, no asking questions and that's, I'm basically pointing at myself cuz it's really hard not to.

He did point at me, but hey.

Okay.

Dq the music.

Um, Simon, what was your first job, Darren?

Uh, first real job was a bank teller, so that was quite interesting.

But I've had other jobs, seasonal work and things like that.

So Handling, no, stop asking questions.

What's your worst job?

Garlic.

Picker, I'm reconciling bank teller with garlic picker.

Well, that, that was a seasonal job.

Okay.

You know, um, the BA weren't paying you enough SW hands or something like No, you stink.

Yeah.

Essentially.

And you can only hang around with other garlic pickers.

So, and I've never thought about garlic pickers.

You can't, you can't go to the park.

If you go to the park, when you pick, you've got a corner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are they soft?

They look just like you, but 'em in the shop.

What is it?

A tree.

Where's garlic?

The roof from the ground.

You got, you've got to bend over all day.

It's, it's back break.

Fuck it.

Yeah.

And you're covered in dirt and, and no one likes you a favorite subject at school history.

I really enjoy looking back at stuff.

What's your special skill?

Yeah, it's an interesting one.

Probably hiding my special skill.

Um oh.

I, I, I, I, I see patterns and I like architecture and I like strategy and, and I like joining the dots and, and sort of working out what's broken in the system and trying to make it better.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Um, all black, which I think a lot of Kiwi kids want to be, that is a rugby player.

For those of audience.

Did you play rugby at school?

I did.

I did for many years.

Played in Japan.

Played, uh, They're all blacks, man.

Butas.

What did your parents want you to be when you grew up?

I, I, you know, the old story, happy, well adjusted type roles and all the rest of it.

And you know, I made a sort of flippant column comment about maybe making enough money to look after them in their retirement.

What's your go-to karaoke song?

So, generally I go to the bar.

You run away from a karaoke episode, that's not a song.

It'll be, it'll be, it'll be, um, I don't know, Bob Seger or something.

That's easy enough to sing in a, in a really crappy, kind, karaoke way.

Yeah.

Born question.

Even though he is not present, I'm now worrying he's still in the building office.

Dogs business or bullshit.

So mostly bullshit.

Mm-hmm.

But I've certainly seen not when you have a dogs on mass in the office, I think that gets quite chaotic.

I seen it.

No, that's terrible.

One, but one or two.

I think it, it, it just changed the dynamic.

Dynamic of the office.

Have you ever been fired?

I think I've been fired.

Cherry picking.

Hang on.

So, garlic picking, cherry picking.

What do you think?

You think?

Well, it could have been a mutual exit.

It was a, it was a cherry picking Standoff.

Yeah.

I think we were throwing and eating more cherries and we were picking, and I think, I think you can tell when the foreman frow at you in a certain way.

Maybe you, there's some fucking cherry.

I mean, seriously, I, you know, that's like, I've gone picking, I mean, you've gotta really be fat fuck to go, you know, to to eat more than your film.

Yeah.

You know, because you're certain.

Eating the garlic, were you?

No, the garlic was, was and, and don't to this day.

Yeah.

What's your vice?

It's a tricky one.

Probably English pubs.

I really like English pubs.

I like the vibe.

I like I I like everything about them.

I think they're quite addictive.

And, and you know, it's the one thing Australian Kiwi say they miss to me about the uk.

They say the only thing I meant, oh, I miss the pubs.

The pubs are fantastic.

Um, this is gonna give you 30 seconds to pinch your company, your podcast, your book, whatever you like, off you go.

Right?

So ttc, the testing consultancy is software testing company.

So essentially, We do one thing really well, which is test software.

So, uh, key part of our strategy is to automate where possible automate everyth.

So I think that's, that's key.

We do that extremely well, company of about 400 people.

So I think most of, uh, those maybe 80, 90% are engineers.

So we are, we're essentially an engineering company and, uh, I, I think one of the things we do really well is we fit into your company's culture.

So I think we try really hard to fit in, um, work within the boundaries of, of, of the culture that, that, that, you know, companies, uh, that we're dealing.

You know, have, and I think that's really important.

That allows us to probably have a bit more of an intimate relationship with organizations, get under the covers, uh, and, and, and that way we add more value.

So we're not just really selling bodies, we're sort of selling solutions and, and trying to get their attention around.

Adding sort of innovative solutions to, to problems that they've probably had for a long time.

So that's it.

Thank you.

You have it.

Uh, that was this week's episode of Business Without Bullshit, and we'll be back with b w extra on Thursday.

Thank you, Simon.

Thank you too.

Thank you.

You Darren, Andrew.

Thank you Darren.

Uh, it's been a pleasure.

Until then, it's chow.

Wonderful experience.