Describe your current job role and a summary of the business model of your organisation?
In his role of Chief Sales Officer of Retro Rabbit Enterprise Services, Tian is responsible for revenue generation, business development and client satisfaction. By leading a team of highly dedicated Client Account Managers he partners with clients to design, build and maintain their digital engagement platforms of the future.
What are your strengths and abilities that you bring to the above role?
As a veteran of the IT industry, Tian has a firm understanding of the drivers of innovation in the software sector and is thus well positioned to help clients navigate their business challenges by using technology as a solution enabler. The ability to understand critical business and breaking this down into solvable technical solutions has served him well in the past.
Clients are being bombarded by vendors offering a plethora of solutions for a single problem often confusing them and Tian’s ability to focus on the core issue helps customers to resolve problems by selecting the most suitable and practical solution.
Please describe the expectations of the end customers that you address. What are their pain points today?
To future-proof their businesses some clients have resorted to taking their digital destiny into their own hands. In doing this they often fail to acknowledge the fact that their core business operations, skills and knowledge are not those of a software designer and engineer. They set themselves audacious targets for innovation and digitisation and often struggle with the capability and capacity to achieve it.
Retro Rabbit steps in to leverage their mastery of many technologies and ability to scale rapidly to augment client teams and provide industry best-practice and hands-on experience to derisk these technology projects and destiny.
Retro Rabbit’s unique approach in the conceptualisation of projects by starting with the end-user experience in mind. This means our teams never lose sight of the fact that instant gratification is the key to digital engagement and aspirations in the digital age amount to nothing unless that is an outcome.
Which generic technologies and innovations can make a difference to your end customers business?
Clients know their businesses best, but often lack the ability to challenge their thinking by considering foreign technologies to help them achieve their objectives. This is exasperated by the rapid rate of change and innovation in the technology field where Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Engineering and Big Data even further complicates the prioritisation of the digital agenda.
Retro Rabbit’s approach to this is to embrace innovation and advances to the extent that it should not disrupt but rather enhance the current technology landscape. Clients have made significant investments in their enabling technologies in the past and expecting them to just abandon that investment is often impossible.
Retro Rabbit breathes new life into these legacy systems by augmenting their capabilities and modernising their technology to not only meet current client demands but also those of the future.
How can a channel partner in your industry disrupt the regional market and gain a leading competitive position?
Retro Rabbit’s approach to channel partnering is a bit different to the conventional in that we are technology agnostic and prefer partnering with companies who advise clients on the desired future state of their technology stack rather than a specific technology. The combination of them providing this valuable insight with Retro Rabbit’s ability to design and develop custom-made software in a low-risk high yield fashion makes this partnership difficult to beat.
Which non-competitive business in the region do you admire for innovative usage of technology?
Tian is a true technologist at heart and believes that technology has a large role to play in the education of the masses and broader social upliftment, most notably in Africa. He admires the companies who are relentlessly working towards bringing technology and the benefits of having access to much needed information to communities.
People often take access to these modern technologies for granted, forgetting how much easier life is due to them. Tian believes that offering a child the ability to live their digital dreams and obtain knowledge and know-how from the comfort and safety of their own home is precious and should be paramount to a birthright in his opinion.
Which aspects of your job role do you find rewarding and which challenging?
The ability to have a direct impact on the wellbeing of all stakeholders in a business engagement is what Tian always strive for. The value-value outcome and the satisfaction of a job well done when everyone has enjoyed mutual benefit from the engagement is what gets Tian up in the morning. Unfortunately, we do not live in Utopia and disappointments are abundant if you are unguarded.
Whilst Tian aims to always see the silver lining in the clouds the impact of generational evolution, Gen X, Y and Z is proving a challenge as companies struggle to align by adopting the evolving demands of their workforce. Retro Rabbit addresses this challenge by providing a working environment that offers work-life balance and the ability to move across many different technologies whilst gaining real-life experience all the way.
How do you best like to de-stress and re-charge off work?
Tian is an avid golfer and enjoys spending time with his family who are also lovers of the game. In addition to sport, he also loves travelling and opening a bottle of red wine and reading a book on self-improvement or business development.
