Most of my career has been spent inside call centre operations. The instinct to simplify was there long before the job title caught up with it.
Early in my career I watched a slow, paper-based process eat up hours that Excel could have handled in minutes, so I changed it. Years later, long before proper mass-communication systems existed, I realised the old Windows "net send" command could instantly reach hundreds of employees at once, so I used it.
Neither of those was a job I was given. Seeing a simpler or different way to do something, and just doing it, has been the constant thread through 27 years, 25 of them inside real-time planning and scheduling, the last few turned fully into building automation, alerting, and software for the teams I used to be part of.
That same instinct is behind a book I wrote on AI leadership, built around a simple framework: Context, Objective, Role, Expectations. It's on Amazon, if it's useful to you.
A lot of what I do is helping people see a simpler way of working, and being willing to challenge the norm rather than just automate it as it stands. That can mean recommending a process change with no code involved, or it can mean recommending and implementing a full technical solution. The problem decides which, not a fixed service menu.
I focus on one customer and one challenge at a time, and I spend real time researching, not just the solution, but the customer themselves and the market they operate in. If that research turns up something worth flagging outside the original scope, I'll say so, but only when I genuinely believe it adds value, not to pad the work.
Just because you can charge more, or reach for a more complicated tool, doesn't mean you should. I stay level-headed and calm under pressure, corporate years taught me that, and I bring the same steadiness to how I price and how I build.
I want the businesses I work with to genuinely succeed, not just to have paid for something that runs. That's the corporate discipline and the creative, simpler-solution instinct, working together rather than one winning out.
I share my home with my wife, seven dogs, a cat, and a fair few other animals besides, and I've volunteered with animals in Japan, Costa Rica, the Faroe Islands, and here in the UK. I've spent years speaking publicly on animal rights, in schools, at events, wherever people are willing to listen. It's not a footnote, it runs on the same principle as the rest of this page: doing the harder right thing over the easier convenient one.
There's a quieter goal sitting behind the consultancy itself, too: building it up enough to fund something that helps people without a stable home. Still early days on that one.
Away from all of that, I've had a passion for musicals since I was young, not something you'd necessarily expect from 27 years in workforce planning, but there it is.