A very potted history of me, boring as hell but I needed to fill a page.

The first thing I want to put is why I decided to create this site. I wanted a place to keep photos and bits and bobs, not because I'm full of myself, just that I know in years to come it'll be cool to look back on the things I've done, keeping this site helps provide the motivation to try to keep things up to date, although I doupt in reality it'll happen ;-)

There was a time that life was so very straightforward for me, clear goals, ambitions etc I guess for various reasons throughout the past 10 years things got a little murky and I've had to view my life very differently. But then I guess doesn't everyone?   I figure it's just called growing older!

Born on the 1st April 1975 I started out as I meant to go on an April Fool, god that joke (is it a joke ?) sure has got very annoying over the years. I started out living in Childwall, Liverpool which gave me plenty of time to develop a liking for either Liverpool or Everton. I never really got going on that front until my Grandad (Ken Davies) took over the catering part of Anfield in the 80s. I started supporting Liverpool and had part time work there on match days, which allowed me to see the match for free. The downside was that I think I got over exposed to footie and now have very little interest at all.

My senior school life was surreal, I used to go to an all boys school in Liverpool which was never boring, fireworks being set off in the playground, nasty blowdarts made out of a pin, a pen and some paper in the back of you neck between lessons ! However, whilst very amusing I hated my time there and somehow seemed to end up on the receiving end of someone else's fist.

When I was 13 we moved to Formby (or here, check out the mfw)and I started at a mixed school around the corner from my house. A mega time I loved every minute - there were even girls !

It was our move to Formby that got me into mountain biking, something that become a huge part of my life. We started out on old beat up motor bikes and would ride them through the woods and on the beach, it was a great laugh especially getting chased by the nature reserve rangers. Realising we were onto a bad thing we figured that mountain bikes would be better, as they didn't have any noise to attract attention… Mountain biking was a very young, cool and growing sport with events around the country attracting up to a thousand competitors most weekends. I raced mountain bikes from when I was 14 till 23, with an 12 month break (literally) when I was 18. It was a really big year for me in 1993, I had been racing well all year and at last had made it onto the British Team for the European championships in Klosters (view my pain). I rode an ok race but was a little disappointed with the result - 71st out of 600. The trip out there and my time in Klosters is something I'll never forgot though. It was at this time I stayed with Jason Mcroy and his dad, Jim. Jason inspired me enormously, however Jason was tragically killed a few years later which hit everyone who knew him really hard. Jim has created a site about Jason, take a look sometime.

A few months after Klosters I managed to get a ride for the GB team again, this time in Metabief, France for the World Championships. In short I took some risks in practise that I shouldn't have and I broke numerous bones in my shoulder and was pretty messed up for a number of months. Gutted that I couldn't get out on my bike training I started to mess about with the 286 p.c. in the corner of the room….. That was it, I was hooked on computers - doh. It all became apparent what I needed to do, so I took myself off to college and took a two year Computer studies course, it was a great course, in fact I enjoyed it so much there (and I'd like to think impressed my tutors so much) that the college hired me and I worked there doing all sorts of stuff for the next year or so (including hardcore cabling - dodging rats to run BNC cabling around the cellars)

While I was off my bike I still used to go the Mountain Bike races, as my then girlfriend Sue (interview) was starting to get well into the racing scene. It was hard to have to sit on the sidelines and not race but I guess I got just as much enjoyment training with Sue and then seeing her do well at the races. I was with Sue from when I was 17 till when I was 25. It ended in a very messy way; do relationships ever end any other way ? In fact it was a hard graft that whole period of my life as I had been trying to raise finance for a business idea and things were on edge to say the least... I met Jo shortly after the split with Sue and we hit it off really well, then two years later we got married.

After my time at Southport college I soon realised that the *real* money was in IT contracting, IT contractor was a very new term then and I figure that I got it just right. Right place - Right time kinda situation. I had spent hour upon hour in front my old faithful 286 in those early days and had been playing around lots with Windows2.0 When Windows 3.1 came out I learnt that inside out as well - a trend that I kept up as each new version of Windows came out. Luckily in the good ol' IT days, Windows skills where in hot demand and not being the usual geeky IT bloke I found it easy to get good contracts that I really enjoyed. With each new role came fresh challenges and I just loved learning more about computers. I decided to take a few MCP exams and would just turn up at the testing centre and take the exams, I passed a number of MCP's to prove to myself I could. One area I didn't know at the time was SMS (Microsoft's remote management system) - so I took time each evening and learnt it, especially software packaging.

Software packaging is the technique of taking the setup routine of a program and effectively writing your own to do the job in a silent way. Once you had this new package you could automatically install that program onto 1000's of computers at night without having to visit each machine in turn. I specialised in being able to dynamically change certain parts of the program depending on where in the world the computer was located or whose computer it was. I got good at this and was offered a position in the Isle of Man Bank, (I think I was about 21) They would fly my over there on a Monday morning then fly me home again on Friday night, it was a great time for me. The Isle of Man is such a chilled place, it was quite a shock for me because I had come from a really really busy IT dept in Siemens Manchester and whilst I was kept busy, the pace in the Isle of Man was chilled. My time there was also memorable because I was able to stay in an attic room of a good friend (Elliot Baxter - on the left) from the Mountain Bike scene and was near enough welcomed as part of his family.

I stayed on at the Isle of Man for about 14months, then had just bought a house so wanted to be closer to it whilst I did it up. I had been talking with some pimps (IT recruitment people - lol) as I was thinking of a move and an offer arose to join the Desktop Development Team for Unilever. The office was about 30mins drive from home and it provided me with 3 years of excellent corporate IT experience on a life changing project ! - the only thing was that the 30min drive changed into me working all over the world - Singapore, San Paulo, Helsinki, Various US cities, Europe. A fantastic experience though.

During that time I stopped riding bikes and just worked, near enough 7 days a week 14 hour days. I would work and sleep, that'd be about it ! I got my own office just to get the mounting volume of computers out my house and would regularly work through the night there. At this time my brother (who is also an IT contractor) finished a contract so we started creating a concept I'd been thinking about for a while - a totally anonymous ISP (Get Free Internet) without monthly charges. We developed the site and backend systems ourselves and set about getting customers. Without any marketing spend we needed a unique way to get people using the service, we decided to offer a "branded" version of the system for free. In other words if you had a web site you could start offering internet access to your customers without a monthly fee. A nice value add service, branded in your identity. It really took off and in months we had about 8000 customers all using the connection. The best bit is that we had formed contracts with a couple of telecoms providers and got revenue back on the call minutes. We started selling domain names and hosting off the back of it as well.

My Unilever life was starting to be strange, not in a bad way, just that decisions were being made above me that I just didn't believe in, or feel passionate about. I eventually got sick of the politics of such a large company and also my team was to be moved to Trumbull in the US, I then had a choice to make… go to the US with the team or do something else.

I decided to leave…....

During my time at Unilever I worked with Thomas Leuschner. Thomas was an excellent guy to work with at that time, he did a great job of shielding us from the barrage of day to day questions and politics that was inevitable with a worldwide implementation of a single desktop standard. We travelled a lot together during those 3 years and two trips had become real defining moments for us. Meetings in the Microsoft offices in the UK and a Dell factory visit in Ireland. Because Unilever was such a large customer for Microsoft and Dell the implications of what we were doing, meant that we needed to get them on board, primarily to see if P.Cs could come pre installed with our build when they were delivered. At the time I didn't think what we had created was any different from other companies - after all we knew all (ok most) of its flaws as well as its good points. However, both the lead technical guys at Dell and the consultants in Microsoft were impressed by what we had done and said it was a unique approach which they liked. Perhaps they were just blowing smoke up our arses but either way it kicked us both into action.

On the way home after those trips we would talk about those comments in more depth. In short what we and the rest of the team had created was a way to manage 1000s (80k in total!) of machines across Unilever worldwide from central service centres (bear in mind this was in 1998 and was cutting edge stuff). So instead of needing an IT dept on each site a service centre would be able to do everything remotely. The coolest part about it was how the machine built. If you needed a new computer one was shipped to you, all you needed to do was plug a network cable in and turn it on. The machine would install itself dynamically so if you plugged the machine into the network in a sales office in Germany the machine would build with German windows *and* all the applications required for the sales department - all without human intervention.

So why was this concept so good ?

We wanted to do this over the net, in other words what if re-created a similar concept but made it available to small businesses, then they wouldn't need an IT department and we could install software remotely overnight or just ship them replacement machines that would build to their standard without us needing to be there. So I had left Unilever (so did Thomas) and we set about raising finance to get this developed - the deal was that I would look after the technical aspects of the business and Thomas the commercial. We researched the project heavily and wrote an epic business plan (which I might post on the archive one day) then we set about trying to raise the finance. I had a bit of a head start as my brother was back contracting again and I needed some cash for the new venture, we got aproached and sold the ISP we had just formed months previously, that gave us some much appreciated cash.

Raising real finance for the new venture was nuts, in 10 months we flew around Europe and probably sat in front of 30 venture capital companies in various guises. We nearly ended up merged with another company in Germany (we added a future story ready for an IPO) that fell through at the last minute as the markets turned. We then got offered the full finance but got advised *not* to take it by our solicitors during the due diligence. It was Christmas eve 2000 and having invested near enough all my cash, not earned anything in 11 months things where pretty grim, but to be fair it never bothered me too much. Sure I was bitter for a few days but then who wouldn't be.

That Christmas I called Thomas and said lets start something anyway - lets get on the phone and sell what we do have - our skills. C2SG (check this name out - Centric 2000 Solutions Group) was born. We had an idea to do software development work (web based stuff) and consulting to raise the money that would fund a development team. It worked ! in the first year of trading we had turned over just short of €700k. We took on 3 developers and one admin assistant and created two products (not the original concept though) Wincrypt and IT-Training.com, we carried on doing software development and consulting however to keep the pennies coming in. It took us a year to get the products developed and launched, however we had all sorts of problems getting the sales in the volumes we needed. Thomas was spending most of his time consulting and back in Germany, I was working flat out developing the products, running the team here *and* trying to sell stuff. In short we took on various sales people and external sales companies but it never managed to drum up enough sales. I did some cool things around online sales and online channels such as on Amazon, but that alone wouldn't pay all the bills. We had 12 staff at that point and tried all kinds - telesales, web site optimisation, white-labelling our products, retail but in May 2004 I had had enough. I wanted to leave, this wasn't fun for me anymore, I felt let down really as I was full time at this whilst others involved were doing other ventures or working for other companies. There just wasn't a team spirit to what we were doing and it certainly wasn't enjoyable anymore for me, so I told the board I wanted out and we decided to sell the assets of the business and close. We did that - it was a sad day for me, however out of everyone involved in C2SG I reckon I learnt the most, it was a rough ride but in my eyes it was a three year training course in business.

A training company who we had done development work for in the past purchased the products and assets. The company was a training related direct marketing company and knew exactly what to do with them, and they got a bargain. I had been doing work for them on and off through C2SG for a number of years, mostly around taking existing processes and creating computer systems to make them more effective. They asked me to join them on a fixed term contract, to be honest I jumped at the chance. I wanted more exposure to direct sales and marketing (post and fax), they now have my old products, they are 10mins from my house and we have some really exciting projects to complete. So why not? I did about 14 months there and during that time made a load of neat IT systems to help manage the day to day operations of the company.

I left UK Training and decided to setup alone, doing a more traditional role (for me) of online marketing and Search engine work for small companies. Get it right on the net and you can reap signifcant benefits to your business; I decided to do risk share with companies on various online projects and it worked out real well.

One of my clients was Euro Property Guide in Southport, we have been marketing their superb off-plan properties online and found that there was other things we could do together, so Vast Visibility Online Marketing was born. So thats me up to date really. I'm there at the moment enjoying my work and creating all sorts of cool online marketing tools. I've just completed a whole raft of new products that will be for sale soon (sneak peak at: Data Completor).

My latest news is that I've recently moved house to a bit of a wreck and am starting the mammoth job of doing it up. You can see some pics in the gallery or you can see more about the computer rendering we did to get the planning permission through. Anyway for now thanks for reading this and I'm suprised you got this far!

Drop me a line if you want, details below..