We caught up with Björn Mattsson for our Pro Interview series. He’s an IT business veteran and the CEO at Heads, an ERP solution for retailers in Stockholm.
Pagezii – Björn, please tell us about yourself.
Björn – As an IT industry veteran, I’ve been in the software business since the age of mainframes. Having a curious mind mixed with a business drive has kept me in this trade for decades. Nowadays, I’m mostly busy with board assignments with a digital agenda and being CEO at Heads.
Pagezii – So what got you started in the IT business?
Björn – To cut a long story short, in my late twenties, I worked in a marine retail store as a salesman, when the owner decided to computerize the business. The vendor offered me a job, and I quickly realized the power of software. And that’s the path I chose for life.
Pagezii – What is Heads?
Heads is a realtime solution
Björn – Heads is a Retail Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suite. Most ERP’s sold today were developed some twenty years ago. Mainly because the whole mass of consultants and IT influencers make a lot of money on SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics and so on. Even worse, most Retail solutions aren’t built for retailers but for the manufacturing industry.
This is where we come in. Heads is a realtime solution – and I don’t mean realtime like minutes but like split-seconds! A huge advantage when you want to have everything online and synced with store data. Now imagine the potential savings by not having a separate warehouse. Basically, you could run a whole chain of stores from “Purchase to POS” on a laptop. This is how powerful the solution is.
Pagezii – That sounds very impressive. And how do you plan to grow in 2017?
Björn – We operate Heads with our own earned money, so our growth comes through paying customers. This means we’ve to be on our toes with respect to client demands. The technology and the design of the solution allows us to develop killer-functions within months. Later this year we’ll launch “The Virtual Warehouse”. This will generate big savings for retailers, as it allows a store to act like a warehouse for the online store.
Pagezii – Finally, what key lessons have you learned as a CEO?
Winning is an attitude, free of charge.
Björn – As a CEO you’ve to understand that you’re “one with the company”. You and your management team are accountable – both within the company and outside. This is a great job, as long as you balance employee drive with the demand of the customers. And of course, with a black number finance sheet – then you’re fine.
That being said, just being fine is not my goal – not when I’m the CEO. I find that it’s your choice to be good enough or to be the best. Definitely, it’s much more demanding to choose the latter option, but it’s so much more fun and rewarding.
Just go for it, trust your employees and yourself. Winning is an attitude, free of charge.
Pagezii – Thank you Björn. I’m sure our readers will appreciate your industry insight in running a successful software firm.
