CEO of the Year: Traveling Man

Steve Singh remembers it as “a moment of clarity” when he decided to change the direction of his expanse management company.

The CEO of Concur was sitting on a jet in the spring of 2000, next to his sleeping wife as the new couple flew off on their honeymoon. Not exactly the best timing to decide to turn your struggling company in a fresh direction.

But Singh had suddenly realized, as he read through his management reports, that Concur had to make radical changes and eliminate some side businesses that Singh, himself, had advocated that the company pursue just a few years before.

In 1993, chief technology officer Mike Hilton and president Rajeev Singh, Steve’s brother, had founded the company, which develops software that automates and manages travel and expense processing for its customers. Since then, the business has survived economic dips and corporate upheavals to grow quietly into a stealth expense management behemoth.

Much of that growth can be attributed to the decisions made by Steve Singh, who had held various positions with technology companies before becoming CEO of Concur in 1996. In his usual thoughtful and self-deprecating style, Singh jokes that he became the company’s chief executive because nobody else wanted the job. After four years of struggles, he believed he had finally hit on the way to build a long-term winner: Concur would drop the licensed software model and launch an on-demand, software-as-a-service, or “SaaS,” model in which companies paid only when they used the product.

Concur would also get out of the procurement and human resources areas, and stick to what it did best: developing and managing software that automates travel and expense management. While few thought there was much of a market for this kind of software, Singh always believed this emerging sector would eventually be worth billions of dollars.

He also knew his plan would face opposition. Many board members favored diversifying the company’s business model. At the time, a software company had never really tried the on-demand revenue model. Still, Singh just knew this was the right direction.

“I sat there and realized that I could choose to face my problems or ignore them,” Singh says of that airplane epiphany. “I chose to face them and make the necessary changes.”

The past eight years have proven Singh right. Every quarter since

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