Fireside chat with AppsAnywhere CEO, Nick Johnson

About company culture, staying true to your North Star and growing with your customers

Nick Johnson co-founded AppsAnywhere in 2009, as the world was grappling with the Great Recession. Not coincidently, this was also a time of real renaissance for startups and the technology entrepreneurial ecosystem. Not quite a unicorn (yet?), AppsAnywhere is a great success story of innovation and authenticity.

Who is the person who leads AppsAnywhere?

When it comes to talking about himself, Nick is a man of few words. He defaults to talking about the company culture, clients, passion, and expertise of his people.

Nick lives in the North of England with his family. He has three children, and his eldest recently flew the family nest to attend Yale University in the US. When he doesn’t work and spend time with his family (his youngest is almost three years old), Nick loves watching lower league soccer, his team being Cambridge United. The Johnson family loves playing squash, but Nick gets to watch it more than play it, as his children have taken on his passion for the sport.

Professionally, Nick has approaching 25 years of software sales and marketing experience and 15 at the helm of AppsAnywhere. In this time, he has met with 400 – 500 universities across 25 countries, something he is immensely proud of. He is deeply connected to the education sector, for which he has a genuine passion. Nick spends a lot of his time visiting customers and attending industry events, and is a frequent flyer to the US, where the company has a North America headquarter and strong growth ambitions.

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AppsAnywhere’s 15-year journey

Early on, Nick and his co-founders saw that delivering software within a university was probably the most complex industry to do so. Take a machine in a library that needs to cater for any possible student enrolled in any possible course. In theory, a student in some universities could go to a different device every single day of their university life. So, university devices in libraries, open access areas or 24/7 labs would need to cater for a potential trainee engineer, a doctor, a nurse, or a teacher. With up to 500 apps needing to be made available to these different users, it was a real issue affecting millions of people.

The challenge and opportunity that AppsAnywhere took on, was to deliver software to students when and where they needed them. This then evolved quickly to students’ personal devices and working from home, with COVID accelerating that even further.

“We believe that delivering software within a university is the most complex environment to do so. Throw in machine imaging, updates of software, software lifecycle management and new cohorts of users, it becomes a nightmare. A third of new users leave and join every single year – no other industry has that!”

The company had a couple of corporate customers over the years but has remained committed to education, using its strong expertise to continue to solve these complex problems for students and universities.

“Back in the day when we were looking at accelerating the company’s growth, we had a big decision to make: do we look other sectors, or do we look at internationalization? From the UK, we started expanding in a few countries in Europe and into North America, where we now have excellent growth across US and Canada. Around COVID time, we started seeing growth in the Middle East and Australia, and those are important markets for us too,” said Nick.

The importance of an inclusive company culture

Two of the most important values, that Nick and the leadership team have worked hard to embed across the company culture, are equity (everyone is treated the same) and family comes first. That’s in everyone’s induction, and something everyone takes onboard.

And to keep these values alive, the company offers unlimited holiday across the board, and supports people to prioritize school events like sports day, for those who have children, or to pursue their personal goals.

This attracts diverse talent, with common values: not coincidentally, about half of the AppsAnywhere staff have partners who work in healthcare, teaching, or charity professions, motivated by giving something back.

The company has also retained its core talent: more than half of its people have been in the company for more than 5 years, with several people around 10 years, which is quite an achievement in a company that is 15 years old.

“I’m very proud of our culture and the kind of company we’ve built here. We really care about our people and clients, and I think our culture fits really well with the education sector, because of who we are and what we believe. We have longstanding staff, who bring so much experience working with universities, and their knowledge and expertise are immensely valuable to universities,” continued Nick.

The AppsAnywhere headquarters are as unique and fun as its culture. Nestled in the shadow of the "Bank," renowned as the Bank of America Stadium and the proud home of the NFL's Carolina Panthers, rests the company’s global headquarters. Situated within the historic Queen City Iron Foundry, reimagined into one of Charlotte's most distinctive workspaces, the office combines tradition and innovation. It has a convenient proximity to Uptown Charlotte, the team of 7 enjoys venturing into the city for meals and exploring the numerous local breweries.

The European HQ is based in the heart of North Yorkshire, where the 30-strong team works flexibly from a converted pub. While there is no beer on tap, the space retains its original features, and the “bar area” is the host of company meetings, presentations and social events and the odd lunch-time darts competition.

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What does the future hold for AppsAnywhere?

Not a fan of the old crystal ball, Nick is reticent to make promises or disclose plans that are not fully materialized. Instead, he prefers to focus on the “direction of travel” for AppsAnywhere – the company and the product. And that is to make things easier for people.

“A number of institutions I met in North America in the last few weeks are 50% down on their IT resources, without being able to recruit them. This is a trend we see across the sector globally. We believe our role is to do more for our customers.”

This translates into more “out of the box”, more automation to remove all the heavy lifting for universities and get to a “click and go” solution. Any upgrades, patches, or routine tasks can be automated in the product and managed by Appsanywhere, to support universities in this resourcing crisis, and make their lives easier.

It’s very clear for anyone within the business and for clients the vision and mission of AppsAnywhere, without the fluff around it: To help the education sector to deliver software to students and staff in an easy way, so they can improve the student experience and focus on their core purpose: education.

“Fifteen years ago, we saw that the priority for our customers in the UK was the student experience, which was then accelerated by COVID. This placed software access and delivery at the top of mission-critical services. A few institutions have thrown a lot of money at it and gone for VDI-type solutions during the pandemic, but we are seeing them now coming out of that and looking at cost-saving solutions, due to budget cuts and staff shortages.

An IT leader’s job is now to balance student experience and growing technology requirements, with budget cuts, software vendors’ rules and increasingly cyber security. We’re seeing cyber-attacks all over the world targeting universities. While IT teams have shrunk in general, security teams have doubled, if not tripled in most institutions.”

AppsAnywhere’s partnerships with its 300+ clients are based on transparency, open, two-way communications. Many of our very first customers are still with us today, and this longstanding and honest relationship has helped us evolve to meet their needs.

“Our future plan is to continue to strengthen our partnership with existing customers by doing more for them and continue to grow the number of institutions we serve. We have ambitions to double the size of our organization, both workforce and customers in the next 2 to 3 years, with aggressive growth plans in North America. So, this is a very exciting time for us.”

If you see Nick at any industry events, go say hello!

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