The Common Thread Between Conservation and Software Companies

I recently joined Ronan Berry on Midlands 103 to discuss Ishikawa Technologies and our ambition to create the best home for European software companies. The conversation led me to reflect on why stewardship matters, not only in conservation, but in business ownership and succession.

Following recent interviews with the Sunday Independent and Midlands 103, I was struck by an observation that seemed to surprise both interviewers.

On the one hand, I chaired An Taisce, Ireland’s National Trust, an organisation dedicated to protecting our natural, built and cultural heritage. On the other, I spend my working life acquiring and growing software companies through Ishikawa Technologies.

To many people, those activities appear unrelated. Some might even see them as contradictory. I don’t.

In fact, the longer I think about it, the more I believe they are connected by the same underlying idea: stewardship.

When people hear the word stewardship, they often think about conservation. They think about protecting landscapes, restoring historic buildings or preserving habitats for future generations. At its heart, stewardship means accepting responsibility for something that existed before you arrived and ensuring it remains healthy, relevant and valuable long after you have moved on.

That principle applies surprisingly well to software companies.

The best software businesses are rarely built quickly. They emerge over years and often decades. Founders invest enormous amounts of time, energy and personal sacrifice into understanding their customers, refining their products and building teams capable of delivering exceptional service. Along the way they create something that is larger than themselves: a community of customers, employees, partners and stakeholders who depend upon the business in different ways.

When founders begin to think about succession, they are not simply considering a financial transaction. They are deciding what happens to something they have spent a significant portion of their lives building.

Of course valuation matters. Founders deserve to be rewarded for the value they have created. Yet in my experience, the most thoughtful founders are often concerned with a broader set of questions. What happens to the employees? Will customers continue to receive the service they expect? Will the product continue to improve? Will the culture survive? Will the business still stand for something after they are gone?

These are stewardship questions.

Over the course of my career, I have worked with more than 150 software companies and participated in more than 25 acquisitions. One lesson stands out above all others: the quality of succession matters. Some businesses continue to flourish under new ownership. Others gradually lose the qualities that made them successful in the first place. The difference is rarely found in a spreadsheet. It is usually found in the intentions, priorities and capabilities of the successor. That observation was one of the reasons I founded Ishikawa Technologies.

I believed there was room for a different kind of software acquirer. One that viewed acquisitions not simply as transactions, but as transfers of responsibility. One that recognised that preserving what is valuable is often just as important as changing what is not. One that understood that long-term value is created by serving customers well, developing employees, investing in products and continuously improving the business over time.

The company takes its name from Kaoru Ishikawa, the Japanese quality management pioneer whose work helped popularise continuous improvement and root-cause analysis. His philosophy was built on the idea that enduring success comes from the accumulation of many small improvements over long periods of time. That principle has influenced how I think about organisations of every kind.

Whether the subject is a software company, a community organisation, a historic building or a natural landscape, the challenge is remarkably similar. How do we preserve what is valuable while adapting to changing circumstances? How do we leave things stronger than we found them?

These are not questions of ideology. They are questions of stewardship.

The longer I spend working in business and volunteering in conservation, the more convinced I become that the two disciplines have far more in common than many people assume. Both require patience. Both require long-term thinking. Both depend upon balancing the needs of today’s stakeholders with those of future generations.

Most importantly, both require us to recognise that we are temporary custodians of things that matter. That is as true of a software company as it is of a national trust.

Ronan’s show goes out live on Tuesday evenings from Midlands 103 but the podcast may be handier. Listen on Spotify or on Ronan’s webpage.

-SM