The right senior leadership team is more important than ever, says Civica CEO

As the role of the modern CEO becomes more complex, shaped by a challenging economic and geopolitical climate, increased scrutiny and a need to transform their organisations, their leadership team becomes ever more vital.

“I'm always looking as well for people that can create followership.”

Perkins says that latter point is about being able to inspire and develop internal teams, as well as attracting new talent to the organisation. His own leadership team has been built through a combination of internal promotion and external recruitment.

Upskill to unlock the value of your people

“Some people within Civica have progressed into the executive and global leadership teams and they're performing brilliantly, unlocking things they've always wanted to do,” he says. “At the same time, in some critical areas, I wanted to bring in more talent from the outside to complement that capability.”

In keeping with many businesses in the technology sector, Perkins says the battle for top talent remains challenging, but he is offsetting that challenge with a focus on upskilling the teams he has, capitalising on the invaluable knowledge and experience they have of the business, its customers, and its sector.

“We've got a lot of folks who've been in our business for a long time and really know our customers. They've got a lot of expertise and we've been able to complement that with more training.”

Civica has also augmented its workforce with offshore teams and partnerships with external third parties to ensure it has skills and resource when and where it’s needed.

Perkins says getting the right senior leadership team in place, and ensuring they have the support they need makes “the biggest single difference” in enabling him to do his job. “It means I can focus on leading rather than doing.”

How to build a champion

For Perkins, the priorities he has as CEO fall across three categories and two time-horizons.

The categories are trading, talent and transformation: driving, measuring and reporting business performance; ensuring the right people are in place to support performance and strategy; and building a future-ready business for customers who themselves are undertaking significant modernisation of the services they provide the public.

While his focus on business performance encompasses quarterly, half-yearly, annual and five-year outlooks, he says his overarching time-horizons break down more simply. 

It is Perkins’ job as CEO to ensure the company is not pulling in different directions. He must calibrate the right amount of focus on each, and create and communicate a coherent path between the two—ensuring quality execution in the near-term while maintaining a focus on a long-term direction of travel.

Two examples where action today can create a coherent path to a more successful future for Civica are in its strategic use of AI and M&A.

Challenge conventional wisdom

When it comes to AI use, he says Civica resists the short-term temptation to pursue multiple, speculative pilots, preferring to rigorously test hypotheses and whole-heartedly commit to use cases where impact and long-term value can be seen. The greatest area of success and long-term value Perkins sees with AI is the use of teams of agentic AI developers accelerating the software development cycle.

“Conventional wisdom says building software takes time,” he says. “That has been thrown up in the air with AI. The ability to work with amazing software engineers who can then oversee dozens of agentic developers changes time to value, changes speed, changes return on investment completely.”

Despite the rigorous testing of hypotheses and the early establishment of business cases, Perkins says progress isn’t dependent on having all the answers. “I know this approach is going to make us significantly better, but I don't yet know how much better because we're still learning,” he says.

Get better, not just bigger

When it comes to M&A, Perkins says he expects Civica to significantly accelerate its acquisitions beyond the two it has made in the last three years. Civica itself was acquired by Blackstone in 2024 and Perkins says the company’s new owners are very supportive of his plans to create long-term value through acquisitions.

“For us to be successful in the investor context, I have to make our business bigger, but there's no point in making it bigger if I don't also make it significantly better. I'm looking very much for M&A to bring capabilities that we don't have. It's about extending our relevance and value to customers rather than just trying to plump up the short-term EBITDA.”

And as with his approach to building his executive team, acquisitions must be about upgrading, not simply adding to, the collective whole.

“Good businesses buy great businesses,” he says. “You need to understand what's going to add value to your customers and ultimately over time add value to you.”