Angus Mansfield (monday.com)
Straight out of high school and into a ComTech Education certification boot camp, this chartered the career path for monday.com’s APAC regional director of partnerships, Angus Mansfield. After working in the UK for a few years, Mansfield returned to Australian shores and co-founded Sydney-based managed services provider, XCentral in 2005 and rode the rewarding and challenging rollercoaster of owning a business, until it was acquired in 2020 by Nexon Asia Pacific.
What was your first job?
Technically you could say my first job was mowing lawns and painting a house. I’m not sure if I was any good at either of those things, but I was cheap labour at the time. My first “real” job was working in a sporting goods store. This combined my love of sports and the need to earn and save money, so I was happy.
How did you get started in the IT industry and progress to where you are today?
Towards the end of the dot-com boom, I came straight out of high school and completed an IT certification boot camp at ComTech Education. Through the certification, I managed to land a position as a systems engineer at the main ComTech system integration business (this later became Dimension Data) which was a really impactful start to my career.
I consider myself lucky to have gained such great experience early on. From there I decided to step out of my comfort zone and moved to the UK at the age of 21. In the UK I worked in the application deployment space, mostly in financial services, which was a steep learning curve in a much larger market.
I returned to Australia in 2005 and co-founded XCentral, a Sydney-based managed service provider and system integrator. As anyone who has done it will tell you, nothing prepares you for the rollercoaster ride that is owning your own business — it’s rewarding and at the same time so challenging.
I will always appreciate the life and business lessons it taught me (even if I didn’t enjoy them at the time!). I was also thankful to have started the business with two friends because it meant we could all learn alongside each other, and almost without any planning I gravitated toward the sales side of the business.
In a great end to a great experience, XCentral was acquired in 2020, and fast forward through integration, a global pandemic and a career break, I’m thrilled to have joined monday.com to run the partnerships business across the Asia Pacific region.
After so many years of working with vendors, this is my first time working for a vendor, and I’m really enjoying it. Working on the product side of things is different but seeing the impact a platform like monday.com can make at scale to organisations in all segments and all industries across the world is something I’ve quickly come to appreciate.
What are some of your plans for monday.com in the coming months?
Over the last six months, we have focused on growing our team and have brought together a real breadth of expertise in our channel and strategic alliance teams across the region with footprints in Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo and Tel Aviv. We are now in the process of repeating that recruitment process with partners.
In the channel, we have a great partner ecosystem that we are building on to service SMB, mid-market and enterprise customers including Dialog, Datacom, Upstream, and Work Perfect.
Equally, in the strategic alliances space, we are in negotiations with some of the largest global system integrators about building monday.com practices to service APAC enterprise organisations.
This includes not only broad monday.com workflow and automation projects but also driving solutions such as OKRs and Enterprise Agile. Some of our current strategic partners include KPMG, NTT Data, and Accenture.
The outcomes our partners are driving through integrations between monday.com and other line-of-business applications are proving extremely impactful for customers. It’s an exciting time seeing the demand for monday.com continuing to grow in the APAC market.
What has been your biggest business mistake, and the lessons you’ve learnt from that experience?
It’s hard to narrow it down to one! After running a professional and managed services company, my biggest learning was maintaining a healthy balance between business and tech while navigating a business.
For example, if you’re too technically focused it is possible to lose control due to a lack of pipeline certainty and visibility. Likewise, if you become too sales-focused you might drop the ball on technical excellence, which is often what the business was built on in the beginning. It is a difficult balance to strike, especially as a small business, and in hindsight took me longer than I would have liked to figure out.
What are some of your ambitions - personally and professionally?
Right now I feel privileged to be working with great people, in a great company where I have the opportunity for continuous learning.
Professionally, my goal is to work in a role where I can make an impact, in a company that makes an impact — that was my criteria when joining monday.com and it’s a model I strongly believe in.
We have a massive opportunity right now to help businesses across APAC grow efficiencies through our partners, at a time when the monday.com product and associated services are in high demand.
To the best of my ability, I want to do that opportunity justice with my team and partners. On a personal front, I’m doing my best to be a good husband and father to my wife and three kids. I can’t think of a more important job.
What has been the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
There are two pieces of advice that have resonated with me, but they are related so I’ll use them both! The first is the statement “hope is not a strategy” and the second is “fail fast”.
Having a plan is no guarantee of success, but by having that plan — even if it fails — at least you’re trying something. It was a liberating moment when I finally understood that failure is not only okay but completely human.
At the end of the day, this is what helps us appreciate and celebrate the wins in life and also serves as a learning moment to grow from.
