Crazy for ConTech with Angelos Nicolaou, SEKTOR

Welcome to ‘Crazy for ConTech’ with Romey Oulton, a Q&A focused on the Construction Technology Industry. 

This Q&A series is an opportunity for our Head of ConTech, Romey Oulton, to discuss all things construction technology with key players who are championing innovation and digitalisation in the construction space. 

This week we have been in touch with Angelos Nicolaou, CEO of SEKTOR.

SEKTOR is a Technology Adoption Company that provides a single point of support for multiple solutions and a complete system to ensure digital engagement across your projects. Whether it’s streamlining the onboarding process, providing hands-on training, or ensuring continuous support and updates, SEKTOR equips businesses with the tools and expertise needed to fully realize the benefits of their tech. Our goal is to ensure Technology becomes an integral and a value-generating part of your operations.

What was the mission of SEKTOR when you created it? And what is unique about your business and why does the industry need you?

SEKTOR was created to help companies use the technologies that they purchased. We realized that due to the growing list solutions that companies purchased, they weren’t using most of it. And when you don’t use a technology, you don’t just lose your licenses fees, you also lose the productivity gains that it could have given you. We think technology is wonderful and helps move forward as a species and our aim is to make this process simple for our customers.   

What is the state of Technology Adoption in Construction? What’s the missing link in supercharging tech adoption?

Very bad but improving. Most companies purchase the technology without dedicating adoption resources. McKinsey says to make a technology successful, should dedicate at least a dollar for a dollar. That’a dollar for adoption for every dollar spent on license fees. 

“Adoption Vs Implementation” – what’s the difference and the unique challenges faced by each process?

Implementation is technical. It concerns the setup and technical connections of the software. The biggest challenge with Implementation is cross platform technical know-how. 

Adoption has to do with using the solution. The biggest challenge is change management, which mostly has to do with the unsexy task of chasing people to use a partitualr solution.

It’s often said that our industry has an ‘adoption challenge’ – what role do technology start-ups have to play in ensuring tech isn’t seen as a ‘headache’ for the end user and to what extent are the start-ups responsible to offer customer success as part of their package to solve this?

The first thing that come to my mind are quick wins. Your product or service has to provide quick wins for your customers. Short time-to-value is a big plus. 

What will be the biggest trend in the ConTech space in 2024? What will be the biggest challenge?

It’s the biggest trend everywhere. GenAI will play a huge role in construction, and if your product does not include GenAI, your chances of fast growth are lower. 

What’s something exciting coming up for SEKTOR?

The development of our platform. For the last two years we’ve been using a proprietary AI-based system to scale our service and delivery a high quality service. We’re developing the platform for client use, and we couldn’t be more excited about it. 

What inspired you to be the leading figure of a company like SEKTOR? 

Necessity. I get the question of why you don’t have a co-founder very often. Unfortunately, I hadn’t met the incredible people that I did before I started the company, but I had to start Sektor because I couldn’t stand looking at the problem every day and not doing what I knew I could. 

What’s the biggest lesson you learned from running a start-up? From your learnings, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs who want to follow in your foot steps?

Make sure you are delivering value to your customers. If you are, sales will come in, and strong sales is the solution to almost all of your problems. When sales are good, everyone’s happy, everyone’s having a good time. When they’re not, everythings wrong with everything. 

What’s your strategy to ensure you hire the best talent for your company? How has this changed as you’ve progressed through various stages of growth?

Hire slooooooooow. At least, as slow as you can. There are a lot of factors that you need to consider, and you must consider them all. There was a time when we said it’s all about the skills. Learned out lesson there. Then we said it’s all about the attitude, skills can be taught. But when you’re a startup and you’re self-funded like we are, you don’t have time to teach while scaling. We learned our lesson there too. You have to test for both skills and for cultural fit, and when you find the right fit, do what you have to do to hire them, it will be worth it.