Experience

I’ve spent most of my working life solving problems.

Some have involved businesses. Some have involved technology. Some have involved people, which are usually more complicated than the technology.

Over the years I’ve worked in large organisations, built and run businesses, written a book, published articles, spoken at industry events and spent a great deal of time figuring out why things that ought to be straightforward have somehow become difficult.

That experience is what I bring into the room now.

Business ownership

I’ve helped build and run Litenet, a telecoms and technology business working across a wide range of sectors.

Running a small business teaches you things no management textbook really prepares you for. Strategy, sales, cashflow, recruitment, customers, suppliers, projects, mistakes, difficult conversations and the occasional piece of office equipment that everyone mysteriously believes only you can operate.

It gives you a very practical understanding of how businesses really behave.

Three decades in technology and telecommunications

My technical background goes back around thirty years and includes enterprise telephone systems, communications infrastructure, connectivity, VoIP, legacy systems, modernisation projects and solving the sort of problems where everyone has already tried turning it off and back on again.

I’ve worked with complex systems in offices, hotels, ships, churches and all sorts of other environments.

That technical background matters less because of the technology itself and more because it trained me to look for causes rather than symptoms.

That habit has followed me into business.

Speaking and industry events

I’ve spoken at industry events including the WAN Summit and have spent many years presenting ideas, explaining technical subjects and helping people make sense of things that initially appear complicated.

I’m not especially interested in making simple things sound clever.

I much prefer making complicated things sound simple.

Author

I wrote Preparing and Planning for a VoIP Migration: A how to guide for businesses moving to VoIP.

It was originally written to help businesses understand a subject that was becoming increasingly important, without assuming the reader wanted to become a telecoms engineer along the way.

Apparently people are still buying it.

Which is nice.

Published articles and industry writing

I’ve written for business and industry publications on subjects including technology, communications, remote working and the way businesses adapt to change.

That has included articles for the Association of MBAs and specialist technology publications such as CareTalk. Interviewed by technology news site, Techround, and even a Case Study by TP-Link!

Writing forces you to understand something properly.

It’s very difficult to explain a subject clearly if you don’t.

Problem solving

This is probably the common thread through everything.

Technical faults, operational problems, difficult projects, business bottlenecks, unclear responsibilities, awkward customer situations and systems that have evolved into something nobody quite remembers designing.

I like getting underneath the obvious explanation and working out what is actually happening.

Sometimes the answer is technical.

Sometimes commercial.

Sometimes structural.

And sometimes the answer is simply that everyone has become used to something completely ridiculous.

Community and wider experience

I’ve also spent time serving my local community, including as a parish councillor, and I’ve been involved in voluntary work.

That might seem separate from business, but it isn’t really.

Community organisations have budgets, personalities, politics, priorities, limited resources and occasionally very strong opinions about surprisingly small things.

In other words, excellent management training.

The useful bit

None of this means I have all the answers.

It does mean I’ve seen quite a lot, solved quite a lot and made enough mistakes to recognise some of them before they become expensive.

That’s usually more useful than pretending there’s a formula.

Talk to Chris