Studio

A pasta factory and a pizzeria of his own: production, input costing, purchasing and suppliers, sale price and margin. The full circuit of a consumer business, with his own till inside it.

Head of kitchen at a restaurant franchise and at a speciality coffee house: process standardisation, quality control and team coordination under variable demand.

Head of kitchen at a mountain hotel: planning and resource management for 250 covers a day, with perishable stock, tight purchasing and no margin for supply error, in a place with no supplier round the corner.

Assistant manager at a supermarket: restocking, stockouts, staff management and customer service on the floor.

Through all those years the work was done by hand, or in a spreadsheet — exactly what the software does now. That is where knowing what it feels like to discover at month end that a product has been selling at a loss comes from, and why it happens.

Contact centres and a roadside assistance network: front line for vehicles involved in accidents, coordinating resources with the customer on the worst day of their week. Promoted on performance to supervisor for high-end vehicle warranties and for complex cases requiring a mobile workshop.

One case sums up the craft: talking a mechanic through the complete strip-down of a lorry’s transmission by phone, step by step, at the side of a road — with the gearbox seized the wheels would not turn and there was no way to get it onto the recovery truck. It worked.

Three capabilities come from there and get used in every implementation: explaining a technical procedure to someone who does not know it and is under pressure; staying calm and deciding from data once something has already broken; and holding a consultative sales conversation with a company or an institution, in their own register.

More than twenty years of visual and sound craft. Music production since the age of sixteen, with Ableton Live and Max for Live — which is signal-oriented visual programming: building a tool that does not exist because no commercial one does exactly what is needed.

From there came more than fifteen released records, almost fourteen years teaching music production, and today a record label of his own with two partners, where every cover, every video and the website are designed in house. Photography and studio filming as well.

All of it shares one thing, and it is the one used daily: looking closely until you find what does not add up. A colour out of tune on a cover, a cut half a second late in a video, a kitchen where waste leaks through a procedure nobody reviewed, a figure on a dashboard that is correctly calculated and wrongly conceived.

That way of looking became a system in the Quality and Innovation department of a company building embedded software on its own hardware: requirements discovery with every department, documentation of what had never been written, QA testing of software running on internally designed hardware, and maintenance of the quality management system under ISO 9001:2015, audits included.

An audit forces you to walk the whole process — not the task that fails, the entire process, with every interaction between departments — and that is where you learn the problem is almost never the one reported. It is the workaround someone put in years ago to get through the day, and that nobody remembers.

That is why, in a first meeting, the first half hour is not about technology. It is about how the work happens today. And the answer lands quickly, because at some point it was the job.