In this insightful video, the CEO of ScreenCloud discusses the challenges and importance of transitioning to an AI-first culture. He shares his leadership approach and the necessity of embracing AI for future career success.

Embracing AI: Leading Change at ScreenCloud

I told my team they were probably going to hate me for what I was about to do. But sometimes being a leader means parental tough love. At a monthly All Hands back in February this year, I told the team that ScreenCloud was going to become an AI first culture and that I was going to enforce that. Now, most people don't like change to be enforced upon them, especially if it's something they're already nervous and agitated about. Most people are worried about what the future means with AI, and therefore that's part of the reason that they're not embracing it. I totally understand that. However, through my eyes, I don't think it's going to be possible to not be a technical company that has fully embraced AI imminently in the next six months, in the next 12 months. And so by forcing the agenda internally, but also trying to help people along the way, I think that we give people the best chance of their future career, both at ScreenCloud and wherever their career takes them afterwards. Here's a quick clip. I'm going to give you the best uplift in your career you'll ever get from me. I'm going to force you to become people that use AI. ScreenCloud is going to be a business where the people inside of ScreenCloud use AI. I don't expect you to be an expert today. And in every task I do, I will identify my ability to do that task with the addition of AI as a tool next to me. Now, when I delivered this, I was actually a little bit scared and I was not entirely sure how people would react, but it has been really promising and people did take it in the spirit in which it was meant. It's also been helpful that a few months later, people like Toby from Shopify have also said the same thing and even stated it more boldly than I did back then. So this is clearly a trend. CEOs need to really consider this as part of their strategy. And enforcing it is not straightforward. And it starts with telling people what you're going to do.

Discover the staggering costs of poor communication affecting frontline workers. Our collaboration with Unileag reveals insights into how digital signage can bridge these gaps and optimise efficiency.

The Communication Crisis Facing Frontline Workers

So recently, we collaborated with our partners, Unileag, to come up with a report and survey about the state of frontline workers. I'm going to be presenting a series of videos with some of the key findings, but I'd highly recommend that you check out the full report in the comment. The first key finding is that there is a communication crisis that is costing billions of dollars. Frontline workers waste 376 hours annually, on average, searching for information or redoing work that they don't need to do because of poor comms. This wastes over $80 billion in US enterprises alone, and each disconnected employee wastes over $8,500 a year. Clearly by now, you know my opinions on digital signage as an effective communication tool to frontline workers. With this amount of wasted time and money and human labor, surely we can do better. This is what ScreenCloud is all about.

Explore common pitfalls in enterprise digital signage deployments and learn how to address them effectively. Understand the importance of audits, automation in content creation, and demonstrating ROI to secure necessary budget allocations.

Optimising Enterprise Digital Signage Deployments

Although every customer is different, we do obviously spot patterns and errors that people make when they're considering an enterprise digital signage deployment. Firstly, when we first speak to customers, often they have not done an audit of what they already have. So they haven't actually thought about the locations, the number of screens they already have, even if there are already some solutions that have been deployed inside of the business. Often when customers do eventually do that audit, they're quite shocked to find that there's multiple vendors and a real mixed real estate that's going on. In addition to that, some of the locations that they want to put screens, particularly in warehouses and places like that, may not even have the necessary cabling or networking capabilities to actually have screens come online. Secondly, once we are into the rollout stage, I feel that customers make the process of content creation far too manual. They often duplicate effort and make assets just for screens. I advocate for about 80% automation. I strongly believe the information that you want to go on screen already lives inside of the business and could be accessed via integrations, APIs, and various other means. But often people will actually copy paste into PowerPoint and upload, and that is just not sustainable and not scalable. So I would think more about where does this information live and put more energy and effort with us alongside you into thinking about how we could integrate and automate. I think one of the elephants in the room is that there really isn't a line item in the budget already for digital signage when it comes to necessary technology inside of companies, much as I would like that to change. It's our job to create that line item and maybe to display some other ones. In order to do that, we need to show ROI. We need to get the buy-in of leadership that this budget line item is essential. In your first three to six months of a digital signage deployme

ScreenCloud announces a significant investment from Tenzing, a UK growth equity fund. This partnership will fuel M&A activities and support the company's vision for digital signage in the AI era. Special thanks to the ScreenCloud team and partners for their hard work.

ScreenCloud Secures Major Investment from Tenzing

It is my great pleasure to announce that ScreenCloud has taken majority investment from the UK growth equity fund, Tenzing. We are the fourth investment out of their Fund 3, a £900m fund focused exclusively on software companies at the growth stage. So why Tenzing? Well, firstly, their brand and their core values. Tenzing, if you hadn't already clocked, is the Sherpa that helped Edmund Hillary summit Mount Everest. Tenzing's brand is all about supporting entrepreneurs in their journey and fully realising the growth potential of UK companies. Now, with this level of financial backing, we can start to explore M&A activity inside of our category. So cue a load of investment bankers sliding into my DMs, but you're very welcome to because Tenzing have a portfolio acquisitions director who will be helping along the way. And thirdly, their passion and enthusiasm for the vision that we have here at ScreenCloud for digital signage today and into the future in the era of AI. They are not just about the finance, they're very much about the journey. There are a huge number of people that I would like to thank. Firstly, the team at ScreenCloud, particularly the finance and leadership team who have worked tirelessly to help us through this deal. I'd like to also thank the other funds which took part in the process. I really respect you and learned a lot along the way from all of you. I'd like to give a big shout out to the fabulous investment banking team at Silver Peak who have been with us shoulder to shoulder all the way. And all of our other advisors and various consultants who've been involved in the due diligence process, legal process, finance process, tax process, you guessed it, all those processes. We had professionals along the way. Thank you for your hard work on both the buy and sell side. And to all of the investors who've backed us this far, we got over the first mountain. The 10-year goal that we set ourselves back in 2015 has been fulfilled. I'd like to thank the

A candid reflection on the experiences of attending a conference amidst the challenges of travel fatigue. The speaker shares insights on maintaining enthusiasm and the importance of networking. Join us as we delve into the realities of professional events.

Reflections on Conference and Travel Experiences

I'm getting ready for my talks and good gut health. So it's actually quite harming that there's only 14% there. And hungry. I'm so tired and hungry. I'm a bit tired, I thought the conference was excellent. Hi. Hi. Waiting for a picture. We are in Seattle and it's raining. Oh, that's incredibly kind of you. And by the way, we also have been admiring your handiwork. Very tired, but good. Ready to go home. Last flight. Yeah, last flight. Yay. It's a short one.  Thank you. 

Communication teams often imagine how work is done rather than understanding actual frontline reality. This creates a gap—like health and safety messaging that doesn't account for practical constraints workers face. Giving local managers autonomy over messaging helps, as they see work as it's actually done, not as it's imagined from HQ. Their messages resonate far more effectively.

Improving Communication for Frontline Safety

One of the big communication challenges that we all have is that the people who are responsible for doing the communication are often not actually on the front line doing the work themselves. So when they are considering a message, let's say a health and safety message, they are imagining how that work is being done and then pushing a health and safety message against it. So this is known as workers imagined versus workers done. On the front line, you may realize that actually having these big bulky gloves and visor on might make it difficult to do the task and to do the task on time. So people will take shortcuts by either adjusting the equipment or removing the equipment to actually get the work done and therefore making it less safe and having that accident. You've got this kind of broken loop, which is we're saying people don't do this or do this instead, but it's not actually being understood exactly what that task involves. If we had a greater understanding of what was really going on on the front line, we could adjust that messaging. And when it comes to screens, this is why I like the idea of giving local managers some autonomy on the messages that they're sending because those local people will see work as done, not how it's imagined to be in their environment. So the messaging that they might be able to come up with about why not taking that shortcut or an alternative would resonate harder than someone back in HQ who's having to imagine what's going on, which is no simple task, but their message is not going to land anywhere near as strongly.

The CEO's role evolves significantly from 5 million to 20 million ARR. You shift from hands-on leadership to guiding a fully developed leadership team. You'll likely move upstream to bigger customers and contracts, requiring expanded support teams. And you'll need robust data and reporting systems to replace the organic understanding you had when directly involved in everything.

Evolving CEO Role from 5M to 20M ARR in B2B SaaS

So, on the journey from 5 million to 20 million ARR, I think the role of the CEO evolves in multiple ways, but the three that come to mind would be, firstly, how hands-on you are. At 5 million, you're still going to be very much in the trenches. You'll be building out the start of your leadership team, but you're probably still very much being the main leader and coach. At 20 million, you really need to have your leadership team fleshed out, and you're working mostly with them rather than with the people who are working inside of those teams. Secondly, if it's B2B SaaS, mostly I imagine you'll be going into bigger customers and bigger contracts. If you're doing small contract values at 5 million, you need to do a lot more of them to be keeping your growth rate going at 20 million. So, it's much easier if you can attract bigger customers and be selling more to those customers than just doing a massive number of customers. Not everyone follows that path, but generally speaking, most of us will probably go upstream, and that has a load of other elements to it, not just the product improving for enterprise and being more applicable to enterprise, but you also have to build out success teams, finance teams, even have more legal support, et cetera, to do that. And the third one would be numbers. At 5 million, you don't really need that extensive reporting. You need to be on top of your numbers so that you know what's going on. But you probably don't have a RevOps team necessarily really going at that point. By 20 million, you need to have data and reporting extensively to give you what previously you would have understood everything a bit more organically because you were involved in most of those things. When you're less involved at the day-to-day level, the data and reporting helps you to identify what isn't and isn't working well. And if you haven't got a good handle on that, a data lake and a good reporting system, you're going to struggle.

Behind-the-scenes from our first customer conference. The stage looks incredible, we had a brilliant dinner with customers and partners last night, and I'm feeling nervous but excited before going on stage. The team has set the bar remarkably high for our inaugural event.

Behind the Scenes at Our First Customer Conference

So a quick behind-the-scenes video. We're getting all set up and ready for the customer conference, looking amazing. The stage is incredible. We had a really good dinner last night with all of the customers and partners and today it's all about content. So we'll be up on stage soon, having a bit of a good luck coffee. A little bit nervous before we get on stage but also really excited about what's coming and the team have done an amazing job. I can't believe this is our first one. We've set the bar pretty high.

I reflect on 10 years since David and I first publicly discussed ScreenCloud. What started as a simple prototype has grown into a platform serving over 10,000 customers with a team of 100+ people. Whilst building the product was far harder than imagined, it's been incredibly fulfilling to see our vision of screens that communicate come to life.

Celebrating a Decade of Digital Signage Innovation

So, an exciting milestone. It was exactly 10 years today that my co-founder, David, and I first publicly spoke about ScreenCloud, a prototype digital signage product that Luke, our other co-founder, and the team were building. Let's take a look. It's a cloud trying to make it better or easier to connect up multiple screens and push content to them. So, in this case, we're looking to push HTML5 content because that gives us the greatest variety of things we could then do with said screens. And really looking at a whole range of devices from phones and tablets, computer screens, to just smart, inverted commas because they're really not that smart when you get under the hood, TVs. And we think that there might be something interesting here probably for retailers, large offices with multiple screens, and even small offices as well. I mean, just really any kind of company or retailer that's trying to get messages out there and wants to maybe control them from a central point and then try and do some clever things about it. It's pretty early, but we'll probably have some kind of demo by the beginning of next week or just after Easter. So, definitely looking a little bit older and certainly a bit wiser when it comes to digital signage. Building that product was way harder than we could ever have imagined, but it's also been incredibly fulfilling. We have over 10,000 customers, a fantastic team of over 100 people. And every single day, we get up and continue to innovate the platform and try and bring that vision to life. We're focused these days more on screens that communicate. This is a huge passion. And this year, we want to educate our customers even more so they can get the most of those screens in their environment. So, excited for the next 10 years. Start thinking about what the next 10 is going to bring. With that in mind, have a nice Easter.