Life and Leadership
CARLOS FAIRGRAY
Technologist. Executive. Entrepreneur.
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Executive Summary
I take business ideas and turn them into reality. I love the challenge of creating innovation pipelines that have quality people streaming valuable technology to business. I build teams with the right people, who have the right behaviours, attitude, tools, and methodologies. I then steer them to success by communicating a shared vision, mapping out the journey, and ensuring they have what they need to get the job done. This is my passion. This is my strength.
Over the last ten years, my products have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in measurable benefits, realised 25% year-on-year growth, driven professional service delivery up by 19% year-on-year, won multiple innovation awards and established market leadership.
My initial background was software engineering, but my career path has touched almost every aspect relating to facilitating customer wins from software. I have spent countless hours working beside customers on requirements, solution implementations, sharing product vision and supporting their success.
Why have I been successful? I believe it comes down to my unwavering principles, relentless drive, attention to detail, and unwillingness to accept mediocrity.
Chief Technology Officer, Herron Todd White
Entrepreneur, director and contributor of 4 different start-ups. Intrepreneur involved in countless projects
Development, architecture, product management, consulting, management, executive
Cultivation, team building, organisation restructuring, change management, hiring, firing, talent development
Bachelor of Computer Science (with Distinctions), Queensland University of Technology
Outdoor activities, mountain biking, Taekwondo, visual design
Some real nice people saying real nice things about me and the things I've achieved
Executive Career
July 2010 - present
Chief Technology Officer, Herron Todd White
November 2017 - present
Herron Todd White is currently the largest and highest performing property valuation business in Australia.
I am responsible for Herron Todd White’s technology team and, in the last two years, I have overhauled every aspect of this team and have grown it from 15 people to 65 in multiple squads, including an offshore component. During this time, I have also recovered several projects that had spiralled out of control. Under my leadership IT output has increased by 306% and the technology team has regained the trust and respect of the business. This has facilitated discussions leading to an increased IT budget of 262%.
In July 2020 the business attributed some significant year-on-year benefits to the efforts of the IT team including a 19% increase in valuations per FTE, 7% increase in profit per valuation, and 27% increase in EBITDA per FTE.
My scope covers both software development and IT operations. My teams include Product Management, Software Development, QA, Operations, Information Security and Helpdesk. These teams are located at various locations around Australia and the Philippines.
In this extensive role, I get to exercise my deep technical knowledge and business acumen to deliver competitive advantage for Herron Todd White.
Executive Vice President Technology & Innovation, Oniqua Intelligent MRO (now IBM)
July 2010 - October 2017
Oniqua delivers industry leading analytical solutions to some of the largest mining, utilities, transport, oil & gas companies in the world.
I ran Oniqua's technology business unit incorporating product management, development, QA, cloud operations, helpdesk and customer support. My responsibilities were similar to my current role at Herron Todd White.
I actually joined Oniqua in 1999 as a software developer. As the longest serving employee and an executive, I left the business after 18 years to take up new challenges with the confidence that I had set the business up for ongoing success.
Perhaps my greatest achievement at Oniqua was the successful launch of a cutting-edge analytical product for the asset intensive industry that ultimately lead to IBM acquiring the company in 2018.
Executive Career Achievements
At both Herron Todd White and Oniqua, I transitioned the teams from ineffective development methodologies to well-run Scrum and then Kanban processes. This required re-training, new process and policy, and well-defined team responsibilities. Methodology emphasised design-thinking and customer centered design, resulting in better understanding of customer problems, better solution designs and less risk and waste due to validated prototypes. Release cadence reduced to 2 weeks from 6-18 months for Oniqua and 18 weeks for Herron Todd White, resulting in faster innovation, quicker customer feedback and improvements in quality.
I significantly elevated innovation at Oniqua and Herron Todd White with many new products delivered to market. In March 2020, I released a COVID-19 product that allowed Herron Todd White to continue delivering valuations without entering a property. This product prevented the loss of $24m in revenue from April to September 2020 during lockdowns. At Oniqua I released in June 2017 an innovation helping customers avoid $10-40m in unnecessary procurement annually, and another innovation in November 2016 that saw an inventory reduction of $441m by its first customer. Oniqua and Herron Todd White have been nominated for and have won multiple innovation awards with the most recent being a finalist nomination for Innovation in Property by the Australian Property Institute (API), to be announced in October 2020.
Across Herron Todd White and Oniqua, I executed hundreds of HR events including hires, performance and career development, organisational restructures, redundancies and exits to continuously shape my people into high functioning development and operation teams.
At Oniqua I helped the company migrate from its traditional on-premise licensing model to a pure cloud business selling subscriptions. Within two years, 95% of Oniqua customers had been migrated to AWS. At Herron Todd White, I set a similar course but to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This migration is set to be completed October 2020. To achieve these outcomes at both Oniqua and Herron Todd White the teams embraced SecDevOps along with the culture, processes, tooling and automation that come with it.
I established a “Customer Days” roadshow at Oniqua: a forum to engage customers in the product roadmap and new product ideas. At Herron Todd White, I established an “IT Advisory Group” for similar purposes. These proved to be an excellent method of prioritising development, acquiring customers who wanted to provide input into the development process and become early adopters, and driving new revenue and efficiencies. At Oniqua, attendance tripled year-on-year between 2015 to 2017, with customers consistently providing feedback that the two-day event was well worth the time spent.
In 2012 I facilitated the acquisition of Oniqua by ASCO, a $2 billion company. I handled all technical due diligence inquiries, which also required the rectifying of open-source and commercial licensing issues identified through forensic code analysis.
I delivered ISO27001 certification and enhanced the ISMS (Information Security Management System) for both Herron Todd White and Oniqua. The last certification was achieved in December 2019 after overhauling processes and controls company wide. ISO27001 certification established credibility that passed the stringent requirements of Herron Todd White Clients such as CBA, ANZ, Westpac, Suncorp, NAB and for Oniqua, some of the largest companies in the world such as Exxon Mobile, BHP, and Rio Tinto.
I led multiple technology transformation projects at Herron Todd White and Oniqua. Oniqua migrated from a monolithic Java Swing desktop application to an enterprise-grade, multi-tenanted, containerised, microservice, AngularJS web application. At Herron Todd White, we are migrating an eclectic suite of applications and creating a unified Progressive Web App (PWA) designed to provide a rich user experience even without an internet connection. The new technology stacks have delivered many benefits including an increased pace of development and attracting top technical talent.
At Herron Todd White and Oniqua I built software quality programmes to address product stability issues so significant they were putting deals at risk and impacting company reputation. New process included greater automation, revised team structure, new risk frameworks, improvements to all test types (unit through to e2e and post-deployment), peer reviews, code walk-throughs, and BDD (behaviour-driven development). At Oniqua, customer support costs reduced by approximately $300K annually, and product issues had not impacted an implementation project within my last 18 months. At Herron Todd White, 3rd level support escalations have currently been reduced from 20% to 5%.
Technologist
I got my first computer when I was 13. While most my friends were using their computers to play games, I was messing around with operating systems and developing my own games. My love of technology has only grown. In 1998, I started my first full-time coding role and continued to focus on refining and expanding my software engineering until mid-2007. At this point, I was given an opportunity to scale my passion for technology through leading other people. From this point, I have focused on remaining a strong and credible technical leader by keeping abreast with technology, diving deep into the leading technologies, and ensuring I can keep it real with my team.
My Hands-On Development Experience
Business Leader
As a business leader, I have been heavily involved with the following:
Leadership & Strategy
Executive meetings
Management of technology business unit
Weekly executive and monthly board reports
Broad communication across company
Product vision & roadmap
KPIs
Legal
Contracts
NDAs, MOUs, SOWs.
Policies and procedures
Acquisition and IP due-diligence
Product copyright registration
Source code escrow
Open-source compliance
HR
Goal setting and performance reviews.
Recruitment
Redundancies
Dismissals
Employees, contractors
Off-shore teams
Freelancers
Product Launches
Foundation customers
Beta programs
Marketing support
Internal change management
Go-to-market launch management
Customer road-shows
Analyst briefings
Funding
R&D grants and incentives
R&D taxation
Business cases
Compliance & Certifications
ISO certification (ISO27001)
ISMS audits and compliance
Sales
Proposals
RFP response
Pre-sales support
Product demonstrations
Innovation
UX, research, prototypes, MVPs.
Hackathons
Technology evaluation & partnerships
Inception workshops
Idea forums
Culture
Cultivation of culture and diversity
Organise team and company events
Establishment as employer of choice
Celebration & fun
Budgets
Budget preparation
Capex requests and approvals
Actual reporting and analysis
Consulting
Technical solution design
Product design and requirements
Innovator
I might currently be an employee, but I think of myself more as an entrepreneur and business owner. I strive to drive everyone around me to challenge the status quo, test assumptions, and to embrace change. When somebody tells me something can't be done, it motivates me to find a way to make it happen. While holding down full-time work, I have also been involved in many different start-up projects. Below is a sample.
Buy No More
Chief Technology Officer
March 2011 – June 2014
As part of the sharing economy, I joined forces with two other entrepreneurs to form a company that would facilitate the sharing of stuff. Conceptually you could share anything you owned, with appropriate trust and insurance concepts covered. A few companies have tried and failed to get people sharing their things. At Buy No More, we believed there existed a secret ingredient everyone else had missed in their solutions. My role in this was product design, mock-ups and working with off-shore developers to build the product.
Universal Payment Systems
Software Architect
November 2002 – January 2004
I joined a small group of entrepreneurs to develop and provide secure business payment solutions. The systems developed supported manual and recurring electronic direct debit or credit card payments via the web, phone, or form lodgement. My role was in the design and development of the transaction processing system responsible for generating transactions, interacting with the internet or phone IVR systems, and clearing transactions with banking providers.
Child Care Knowledge Mgt
Business Analyst
February 2005 – July 2005
I provided Business Analyst services to Child Care Knowledge Management for the design of a new child care centre management system. The system design provided a Windows application supporting automatic billing, staff scheduling, childcare benefit entitlements, and ATO conformance. The design provided an enterprise application supporting head office centralised control within a child care company.
Making Innovation Happen
In my current role, I have facilitated many inception workshops, customer research studies, and hackathons to align hordes of smart people, and rapidly deliver innovative outcomes. In the video below I captured a hackathon event “Panorama in 24hrs” aimed at creating a working prototype to test the validity of a new product idea. Employees from Brisbane and Denver including people from sales, marketing, cloud operations, and the technical team were given just 24 hours to achieve this goal, using 100% new technology. It created a lot of excitement and camaraderie, and the idea was validated as the working prototype was unveiled with just minutes to spare.
Smart
Career History
Software Developer at Oniqua
September 1999 – December 2000
Software Developer at Direct Marketing Software
June 1998 – September 1999
Business Analyst at Child Care Knowledge Management
February 2005 – July 2005
Software Architect at Universal Payment Systems
November 2002 – January 2004
Start-up role
Employee
Chief Technology Officer at Buy No More
March 2011 - June 2014
Software Developer at Reanimotion International
July 2000 – February 2001
Executive VP Technology and Innovation at Oniqua
July 2010 – Present
Product Services Manager at Oniqua
January 2010 – July 2010
Product and Technical Manager at Oniqua
March 2009 – December 2009
Technical Consulting Team Leader at Oniqua
July 2007 – March 2009
Software Architect/Project Leader at Oniqua
July 2006 – June 2007
Project Leader at Oniqua
December 2003 – June 2006
Senior Software Engineer at Oniqua
August 2002 – November 2003
Software Engineer at Oniqua
January 2001 – July 2002
Education
Executive Professional Coaching
2010 - 2011 Martin Hoyle,
PCS Professional Coaching Services
Bachelor of Information Technology (with Distinction)
1998 - Queensland University of Technology
GPA 6.19 (7=High Distinction to 3=Low Pass)
Major Computer Science
Awards
Outstanding Scholastic Achievement and Excellence from Golden Key National Honours Society (1997)
Outstanding Academic Performance from faculty Dean of Queensland University of Technology (1996 consecutive semesters)
Training
Lean Startup Machine – Javelin '14
Business Writing, Thinking on Your Feet, Time Management '11
Unfair Dismissal - Chamber of Commerce and Industry Qld '10
Australian Computer Society Certified Professional '10
Growing Team Leaders - Australian Computer Society '07
Project Management Breakthroughs - Priority Management '07
Working Smart with Microsoft Project – Priority Management '07
Working Smart with Microsoft Outlook – Priority Management '07
The New Supervisor - Australian Institute of Management '06
Business Objects Enterprise Certified Professional '06
E-Commerce Technologies ITN262 – QUT '02
Java & Extensible Programming ITN458 – QUT '02
Object Technology ITN415 – QUT '01
Java Advanced Topics - DSTC National Training Program '01
Java Foundation - DSTC National Training Program '00
Statistical Inventory Control – Mantech '99
Associate Diploma of Information Technology – Logan TAFE '96
Team Builder
I believe strongly in creating a team that wants to work for you and your company. I build teams of great people, which requires establishing trust through open and transparent communication, setting clear goals and expectations, and being a consistent mentor with well-grounded principles. I equip and coach my employees to succeed, and to celebrate their successes.
Mixing it up
I believe in keeping work dynamic to keep people engaged and thinking fresh. One of the ways I do this is by changing the scene and getting away from office distractions
My agile teams do their retrospectives from local coffee shops. I run annual team workshops in remote and beautiful locations including golf courses, the Southbank waterfront, my own home, and beach houses.
Stand Up Guy
People make the world go round and, as a leader, I believe amazing outcomes are realised by helping others achieve things they thought they could never do.
I believe in creating strong bonds between team members. I'm a personable leader who is highly approachable. I have high expectations for others, and I expect them to have the same for me.
Maria Bentancor
COO at Brisbane City Psychologists
I had the pleasure of working with Carlos during my time at Oniqua as the Product Manager. I quickly learned to trust and respect Carlos for his extraordinary competency, ability to execute and product vision. Carlos is a top-notch executive with outstanding skills ranging from technology and innovation, to strategic positioning, to user interface design. He is incredibly focused on process, discipline, and alignment with business goals. Carlos has the special ability to make insightful product contributions at the strategic level, while retaining a deep understanding of the process, technology, business and people aspects that lead to success in the overall product development process. His management style is one of conviction, integrity, positivism and focus. He always makes time to listen to his team and colleagues and provides constructive feedback and creative solutions to any issues presented to him. Carlos has proven time and again that his leadership skills, experience and creativity were critical to Oniqua’s product success. He’s a true professional, always looking for ways he can contribute and add value and, above all, a real pleasure to work with.
Helen Storckmeijer
People & Culture Manager at Megaport
During my tenure at Oniqua I had the pleasure to assist Carlos on mostly people related matters as the Talent Manager. Carlos' passion for innovation was (and still is) evident at all times. He has continuously inspired his team members to give their very best by providing focus, leading with integrity and listening with compassion. His team members respect him greatly and push themselves to deliver. His tireless quest for improvement makes him a professional who is always seeking constructive feedback in an effort to improve himself. Carlos has the ability to remain calm and professional regardless of the issues he may be facing, a very valuable trait to have as a leader. He has all the qualities of a successful leader which will serve him well as he takes Oniqua's product to the next level over the next couple of years. It's been a real pleasure working with Carlos and hope that our paths will cross again some time in the future.
Martin Hoyle
Executive Coach
Carlos is one of those people you meet who you can instinctively tell is destined for leadership. He exudes an air of credibility, honesty and integrity. He brings to his work not only a high degree of competence and technical knowledge, but a commitment to professionalism and excellence in delivery. Carlos balances this with a good dose of self-awareness and a passion to improve himself. He leads his team with fairness and compassion whilst at the same time demanding high standards of performance. It has been a real pleasure to work with him.
T. Tucker
Senior Sales Consultant at Oracle
I worked with Carlos for several years while at Oniqua. Carlos' technical and analytical skills are extremely unique. His skills enable him to take on the most complex requirements and solve them in a timely fashion. In my 13+ years in the IT industry, I can confidently say his skills tower above all. In addition to the aforementioned skills, he is a distinct, quality leader and mentor in a class of his own. I have no hesitation in recommending Carlos for any project, job or task. He has a track record in showing he is a valuable and respected employee in any assignment he comes across.
Fun
I have a work hard, play hard philosophy. I don't care for clock watching. I measure people by what they achieve. I work extremely hard and will put in whatever it takes to get the job done and expect the same from my employees. I also like to reward hard work with life balance rewards. I promote concepts such as flex-time, work from home, work mobility, meetings outside the office, and work social events.
Outside the office, I mountain bike, surf, ski, ride motorcycles, camp, 4WD, video edit, fly drones and build websites like this, just for fun.
Gokarting 2013
Camping Moonee Beach Xmas & NYE 2016
Track Days
