PURPOSE | LEADERSHIP approached football ,” he admits . “ I enjoyed it . I loved it so much and the part that wasn ' t helpful to me is that it was just a group of my friends from similar estates , so I just laughed six days a week and messed around , played football when it was time to play football , but I wasn ' t dedicated to it .”
The turning point came when Forbes came to the realisation that his future was not in football , and that his mountain of personal debt accrued by trying to live that lifestyle beyond his means was potentially “ life threatening ”.
It ’ s hard to imagine the so-called Tech CEO Unicorn speaking to us today being anything other than successful , but it is a given that his success was built on his hardships , failures and work ethic . When you have been in those kinds of situations , you never want to go back .
“ I have been lucky and I ' ve been helped by a lot of people , but I ' ve worked very hard ,” he says . “ I ' ve done the hours , because I don ' t want to be back in that situation . It taught me that you get up , you go to work . You don ' t spend time feeling sorry for yourself .
Dean Forbes CV
“ My career runs from telesales at
Motorola in a kind of windowless room to Primavera Systems via Isis Telecommunications .
Primavera was a private equity-backed US software company trying to grow in Europe and I got in there right at the moment it was really taking off and able to drive a lot of growth there and became the de facto leader of the international business – partly because things were going well , but also partly because I managed to outstay a lot of the other sales people .
We built that business and sold that company to Oracle , by which time I was the leader of the international unit , which was 51 % of global sales at the time of the transaction , and I think my world and horizons just opened at that moment because I had this great opportunity to run this global business unit inside of Oracle .
“ I was working for Charles Phillips the then president of Oracle , somebody I admired a lot , whilst at the same time private equity and venture capital was interested in talking because they had seen the Primavera journey . Because of that , I ended up at KDS where I became CEO . The French-headquartered SaaS business , backed by Excel , was going through its troubles and we were able to turn that one around and sell it to American Express .
And then I moved on to CoreHR with JMI Equity – another company with great aspirations but a bit troubled at the time and we were able to turn that one around and sell it to Access Group . And then Battery Ventures called me at the end of 2020 with the Forterro project .
I think that was a culmination of everything that I ' ve done so far – perhaps I had built a bit of a reputation in the investment community for somebody who has a high tolerance for difficult projects and situations , and it had all the hallmarks that I love in a project initiative . And , here we are having recently [ March 2022 ] exited to Partners Group and looking forward to the next five years .” businesschief . com 81