#293 - Juha Berghäll, CEO ONEiO - on Cannibalizing your own business

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to plug directly into the services of IT suppliers around the globe at the click of a button. My guest is Juha Berghäll, Co-founder and CEO of ONEiOJuha Berghäll is a visionary leader and a serial entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in the IT domain. His background spans over 20 years in enterprise service management.Throughout his career, Juha has held pivotal roles, from being the Chairman of the Board and a Founding Partner at Verco Oy to serving as the Director of Marketing & Partners at Efecte Corp.Juha's passion lies in tackling the biggest bottleneck of enterprise digitalization - integrations. He understands the challenges faced by Large Enterprise IT service providers who strive to collaborate with teams, vendors, suppliers, partners, and subcontractors on different platforms.That's where Juha and ONEiO come in. He envisions an industrial revolution in the enterprise integration space, moving from a hand-made approach to an industrialized, automated, and cloud-based model.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Juha to my podcast. We explore the shift from one-stop shops to best-of-breed providers and what challenges that gives to managing IT supply chains in a changing business landscape. He shares how he made hard choices on his business model, thereby avoiding consultancy temptation. He then elaborates on the big lessons he learned from international expansion, the impact of VC funding, and his evolving go-to-market strategies.Here's one of his quotes:We really changed the game. We wanted to move away from the traditional red ocean of projects, integration projects, and technologies and platforms and provide something that focuses on the end result.​​This is a really new and different approach for this industry. It required, of course, a quite drastic change in that we cannibalized our own business.During this interview, you will learn four things:Why he decided to cannibalize his business and what it meant to succeed in doing so.Why he decided to bootstrap the company instead of immediately jumping into the venture capital trainWhy he'd opt to internationalize the business earlier if he'd do it againHow niching down his target market helped to increase deal size by 5x.For more information about the guest from this week:Juha BerghällWebsite: ONEiO