An SAP Innovator Leading With Empathy. 
In the business community, the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) holds a unique reputation and significant importance. A CEO’s leadership style plays a crucial role in determining an organization’s future growth by serving as a guide towards success and setting the overall tone for the company. His primary responsibilities include establishing the organization’s vision, mission, and values and ensuring they are effectively communicated to all stakeholders. Key qualities such as transparency, ethics, and trustworthiness are essential in building a positive culture within the company and reflect the leader’s influence within his industry. When a CEO embodies these values, it sets an example for employees to follow in their footsteps, encouraging them to embrace and implement the same principles in their work, ultimately leading to exponential growth for the venture.

Christopher Carter, a distinguished leader with a wealth of experience in leading successful organizations, stands out for his remarkable ability to inspire and motivate his team towards achieving their goals while fostering a positive and collaborative work environment. His leadership style is based on empathy and a sincere desire to see his employees thrive, making him an exceptional role model and leader who stands out from the rest. With almost 30 years of experience in the SAP industry, Christopher established Approyo with a vision of providing comprehensive SAP service technology to its clients. As a seasoned veteran in the industry, he has demonstrated a deep understanding of the market and a keen sense of business acumen. The company specializes in hosting and managing services, upgrades, and migration for SAP-supported core functionality. With over a thousand SAP environments managed globally, Approyo caters to businesses ranging from production to landscapes to migrations into SAP S/4 HANA. As a certified SAP partner, Approyo offers its solutions as a service to clients and partners worldwide. Unlike other Managed Service Providers that offer a broad range of ERP systems, Approyo solely focuses on SAP-related systems. While the company provides integrative services with other ERP providers such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, its primary focus remains on SAP.

The Making Of A Spectacular Leader

Christopher’s business journey has been a protracted one filled with several highs and lows, success and failure, and development and stasis. As every CEO has come across this; no path is a straight line, it is one aspect that makes him proud of where he stands in the present-day journey. He began his life as a young man in Wisconsin, having grown up with a mom who received a lot of social assistance. Throughout his childhood, he moved in and out of many homes with various friends and instructors. Gradually, he leaned towards business and sports as he finally settled down for his high school years. He happened to use computers for the very first time in 1984 and later, owned his first PC- Commodores Vic 20.  He learned coding on that system and he recalls his first coding experience as quite fantastic.  “I had seagulls flying across my screen, and I was soon creating my own video games and code,” he recollects. 

While in college, he faced some challenges, but then he discovered a new SAP innovation called R3. Despite experiencing both successes and setbacks, he believes that perseverance is the key factor that determines success. Carter believes that the ability to withstand and recover from setbacks is crucial, and he was fortunate to have supportive friends in the SAP community who have gone on to hold senior roles. As Sylvester Stallone asserted in the legendary movie Rocky, having a strong support system can be both exciting and beneficial. Communication allows humans to exchange ideas, concepts, and thoughts with one another.

In his quest for remarkable achievements, he swiftly acquired the ability to rely on other executives and team members. He stresses that certain offshore team members engage in SAP activities solely to conceal their intentions and create turmoil within the ecosystem. He constantly realizes that being cautious of the individuals he hires, particularly overseas consultants, is imperative. This is because many consultants often work for multiple companies concurrently, leading to disruption in business operations within the organization.

The ‘Pole Star’ Values

On a personal level, Christopher is committed to promoting a structure that facilitates growth for his company, customers, and staff. He has a firm devotion to assisting others, particularly in the SAP and clouded ecosystem. He strives to maintain technological advancement, whether it be through his work in the SAP ecosystem where he played a crucial role in developing the first SAP cloud or in his recent endeavors with AI analytics tools aimed at enhancing customers’ landscapes and ecosystems.

While leading Approyo at the forefront, he has a steadfast mission to support any company utilizing SAP software with the aid of skilled and supportive staff members across the globe. The company offers comprehensive SAP services with expertise in hosting, managing, upgrading, and migrating services for customers utilizing any SAP-supported core functionality. Approyo’s primary goal is to ensure that customers can sleep soundly at night without worrying about any outages or support issues. It goes without saying that customer-centricity is in their DNA.

The USPs Of Approyo

Driven by passion and zeal to serve its targeted clientele in their journey to success, Approyo has been setting remarkable benchmarks under the auspices of its founder. “We are motivated by our passion to add value to our lives. I feel that in the organization, we have an incredible set of skills and we know how to use them on a day-in and day-out basis to support the business objectives. We work with our people and have a deep desire to lead and to succeed with our customers around the globe,” remarked Carter.

Furthermore, Approyo is renowned for its SAP-based solutions and holds a prominent position in the SAP ecosystem. They extend their support to organizations from licensing to implementation, as well as managing day-to-day activities such as ‘Adams’ support. Their services are offered on a global level, and they have transitioned to cloud-based operations. The ultimate aim is to scale up their customer base and assist them in expanding within their targeted ecosystem.

Above all, with its AI-based capabilities and tools, its ground-breaking Overwatch tool is here to assist not only the SAP landscape but also the infrastructure, security, management, and support overall security and growth perspective day in and day out.

Long-Term Objectives

Being a phenomenal leader, Christopher relishes running the company based on his experience and has deep compassion for his workforce. He takes extreme pride in guiding/motivating them on a day-to-day basis, as well as meeting clients face-to-face whenever possible to explain to them his strategies in a proper way. Despite his unwavering dedication to the growth of the venture, Christopher also values his family and desires to spend more time with them as they grow old. Moreover, he also foresees working on some big projects that would prove to be lucrative for Approyo’s futuristic success. Concerning this, he reveals, “I have got some really outstanding new projects that we have been working on around Artificial Intelligence integrating that into Overwatch giving us the ability to manage, monitor and maintain a technical landscape across multiple clouds, around multiple data centers to validate what is happening. To validate security, to validate encryption and to validate the ongoing support that organizations need in this new hyper-aggressive support mechanism, we are all about supporting our customers and the greater good.”

Deriving Inspiration From People

Christopher discusses his sources of inspiration that always kept him going ahead. Among several people out there, one person who inspires him on a daily basis is his mother Cheryl Carter. Despite going through quite tough times medically, she always maintains a positive outlook and keeps moving forward which positively influences Christopher’s personality. He always looks up to her to seek valuable lessons and have the same resolve and care no matter what his personal situation may be.

For his professional functionalities, Christopher draws motivation from Doctor Hasso Plattner who is one of the founders and creators of the SAP ecosystem. Plattner’s vision and leadership have inspired Christopher to watch his growth and learn from how he leads not only his company but other initiatives around the world.

And when it comes to seeking long-term inspiration, he also learns a lot from his adorable children. He is inspired by their acts of selflessness, particularly his daughter who is a paramedic fighting daily to save lives, and another daughter who is studying to be a nurse. Their dedication to the greater good inspires Christopher to be a better person.

The Success Mantra

Christopher extends his heartfelt gratitude for the numerous honors his organization has received, such as being named Company of the Year, SAP Provider of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, etc. However, he acknowledges that he couldn’t have achieved these successes alone. Regarding this, he credits his incredible staff, whom he supports and helps grow, as well as the teams around the globe that hire his organization as their true partners.

When it comes to defining the success mantra, his definition is quite different from others. As per his conviction, he hasn’t found success yet! His urge to learn every day and improve himself has always kept him on his toes to explore several aspects of his personality and he strives to grow every day intending to improve his function. He reveals, “I want to grow every day and I want to be successful in different aspects of life not only as an executive of what I consider to be the best SAP partner company on the planet. I am also focused on being as successful as a father, a husband, a friend, a staff member, a partner, etc. It is very difficult to define what success is at the end of the day as long as I can look someone in the eye and tell them I care about them in one of several ways and also be able to shake their hand that to me is a success.”

Pearls Of Wisdom Shared By Christopher Carter

“Do it…do it…do it…do it…no matter what. For me, there is nothing greater in my life other than my daughters and family and then having started multiple companies and have grown them and nurtured them. I get up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning and I may be the first one in my family to get up early. Still, I’m preparing the company for success; it’s on me. It’s on my shoulders. I’m the one that wants to help customers to succeed. Also, I believe in nurturing other staff members to bring in smarter people who know what you do not know to bring in better ideas/ suggestions that will add to the success of the organization. Watch your productivity grow as well as theirs, and then help with the upcoming new generation. Just because you’re a young entrepreneur does not mean there’s no younger entrepreneur behind you. Remember, as you’re growing and going up the ladder of success, it is important to support budding entrepreneurs to come upscale.”.