Together with her husband, Jana Kapr built a company from Australia with global reach and sales of one hundred million. Its success lies in data.

Jana Kapr speaks quickly and, from time to time, an English expression is woven into the flow of her Czech. It is not surprising, in the mid-1990s, first her studies and then her work took her to the United States, Great Britain and then to Australia, where she and her husband Michael finally settled in 1997.

“I’m fast and I’m a workaholic, I know that about myself and I’m ok with myself. But I think that when I was about twenty-eight and I was working as a manager, I must have been scary for those around me,” laughs the CTU graduate, who in the past, among other things, was involved in water management, worked for the IT consulting company Logica or as a Vodafone program manager launching the first iPhone in Australia.

From Sydney, Australia, the couple started building their company Billigence in 2009, which specialises in business intelligence, data governance, cloud data architecture, data analytics and AI.

Billigence is a consulting company that analyses and visualises data – it can determine what data is important for a company, institution or organisation and deliver it to the end user so they can make the right decision based on it. And they do it very successfully – after fourteen years of its existence, the group is spread over several continents, through its branches in Sydney, Prague, London, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Singapore, San Diego and, in the near future, also in Stockholm; they’re providing services to clients literally all over the world. Due to the breadth of its operations, Billigence can identify the needs of different markets and respond to them in a timely manner.

“It helps us to constantly improve and stay agile,” praises the co-founder of the company, seated in the meeting room of the Czech branch in Prague’s Karlín.

“Each of the markets in which we operate is different from the point of view of analytics and therefore has different requirements. Less than five years ago, we were extremely successful in launching the analytics of how to recruit students for British universities. About eighteen local universities bought our solution, it’s just great. But it took another three years before we were able to sell the same to other universities elsewhere in the world.”

You could read the story about the beginnings of Billigence in Forbes in the Forbes Woman special back in 2018, but a lot has happened since then, and world events have of course also affected her business.

Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic marked an important turning point for the company. “The first weeks were of course a shock, but overall the pandemic paradoxically helped us. A number of our customers switched to virtual mode very quickly, and with that the requirements for our offer of analytics and automation increased enormously,” explains Jana Kapr. During the pandemic period, the company grew twice as much both in terms of sales and in terms of the number of employees and continued to grow in the last year as well: the global turnover of the group, which today has over 300 employees and whose clients include companies such as Mondeléz, Merck, Vodafone, Home Credit, Visa or Erste are close to a billion crowns.

And Jana Kapr believes that her company’s growth potential is much greater, because there are still many companies on the market that have not yet used the magic of working with data.

“A lot of companies have their golden eggs, but they lack analytics that would add golden dust,” says Jana Kapr. “Take banks for example. One of their most valuable products is mortgages, essentially the same product everywhere that changes only minimally. But they lack, for example, knowledge of how long it takes to approve a client’s mortgage, or how successful their customer service is. Using the analytics of these processes, they could find out which branch is performing well, which one is performing the worst, and help them improve their services. In the future, this will be a valuable quality that will determine which company will survive and which will not.”

Despite the success to date and the vision of further growth, which, according to Billigence’s CEO, could soon bring sales over a billion crowns, some things at its core will not change in the future either. “In a way, we will always be a boutique company like in the beginning, and that is precisely thanks to our presence in several branches in different places,” believes the woman, who herself often commutes between branches in Sydney, Frankfurt, London, Singapore and Prague and tries to spend a longer amount of time in the Czech Republic every year. “My biggest goal over the last few years has been to set things up in Australia so that I can go away for a few months and have everything run smoothly without me.”

Jana Kapr has no problem with delegating authority and says that she nurtures potential successors at work and generally tries to make her subordinates self-sufficient – but also satisfied.

“There are incredibly smart and very hard-working people working at Billigence, and I want to keep it that way. Because for a company to work well, you need your people to want to work for you. And that’s the job for you as the boss.” – Jana Kapr

According to Jana Kapr, the support of women, especially when they have a family, is an integral part of a great internal company culture. “I myself was lucky that my company at the time supported me on maternity leave. It’s true that I came back from it very quickly, but I still felt the support,” says the mother of her now 22-year-old son. “And I want to give the same to our women as well. A woman can have everything, but she needs to be given the background for it. And I know that women appreciate that, they are loyal and incredibly efficient.”

Also, for herself, this extremely energetic woman adds that despite all her drive and workaholism, with age and with her family, she has come to the fact that it is important to be at ease, not to get overworked. And her beloved sport helps her to do that. As a former athlete, a middle-distance runner, today she still does triathlon with her husband, in which their son also competes. At the same time, Jana Kapr actively supports children’s sports, both as a sponsor through Billigence and personally. “It may sound strange, but I really enjoy teaching girls to ride a bike, for example. In Australia, everyone can swim flawlessly, but many girls are very shy about road cycling. But when they get into it, it gives them a huge confidence boost. And that is priceless.”

Text: Zuzana Krajíčková, Forbes

Photo: David Turecký

Source: Order in data. ForbesWoman , 2023 (Special), 130.

Online: Order in data. How Jana Kapr built a company with one hundred million sales — Forbes. Forbes  [online]. Copyright © 2023 MediaRey, SE [cit. 05/03/2023]. Available from:  https://forbes.cz/poradek-v-datech-jak-jana-kapr-vybudovala-firmu-se-stamilionovymi-trzbami/