John Smithe - Founder & Managing Director

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." - Terry Pratchett

John's first attempt at a career was as a musician. Straight out of school he secured a place at the Academy of Contemporary Music, a prestigious music school in Surrey, where he studied performing arts. He then failed to capitalise on this running start by joining a succession of bands in which he was the only member with any serious professional ambition.

After several years working every kind of dirty, dead-end job to support a music career that was going nowhere, stocking shelves, flipping burgers, cleaning offices, he found himself employed as a teaching assistant at an SEN school for children with dyslexia and associated difficulties. Confronted with his increasingly obvious failure to make it as a musician, he began to consider teaching as an alternative and returned to full-time education, graduating with a degree in Aerospace Design Engineering from the University of the West of England.

During this period a public dispute over student finance and teacher working conditions made a career in education look considerably less secure than it once had. The degree itself had also convinced him that he had no particular desire to work in the aerospace sector. He took stock of his skills and the one thing that stood out was a knack for computers, so he took a job with a friend's web design company building custom WordPress themes for local small businesses.

The company built a solid local reputation and in 2010 was approached by one of the larger employers in the area to brand a new corporate intranet based on SharePoint 2010. The work was well received, and word spread quickly through the client's network. For the next two years the bulk of John's work was building custom master pages for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 installations. That experience led to a role with Surrey Police, helping to build their SharePoint 2013-based corporate intranet and Document Management System, a project from which he learned a great deal about both the platform and information architecture.

He set himself up as an independent SharePoint consultant shortly afterwards, arriving in the market just as Microsoft began its push to promote Azure and Microsoft 365 as public cloud platforms. Riding a broader industry shift towards cloud and mobile technologies, he rebranded as a Digital Transformation consultant and worked successfully in that field for nearly a decade, taking on clients ranging from bedroom start-ups to multinational corporations. Over the course of his career those clients have included a number of household names: Tesco PLC, Jet2 Holidays, Games Workshop, and Sumo Digital, creators of the popular Forza video game series.

John's LinkedIn Page