1989. The year the world wide Web was created, it would take another 6 years to find its way to my parents’ house in, Crouch End, North London, but when it finally did, I was hooked. Before then I had absolutely zero interest in computers but being a pretty essential requirement to access the web,I had to get interested, fast.
I found I was spending a lot of time in a top floor spare room which I had turned into my de facto office. I had invested in a new HP computer and a US Robotics dial-up modem and would access the web at the mind-blowing speed of 56k per second. One major downside, apart from the speed, was that fact that if anyone called the house line I would be cut of and whateverI was downloading at the time would be lost forever!
I remember having to pay for my first browser which was Netscape Navigator and then downloading it overnight and hoping that the connection would not fail while I was asleep!
In 1999 it did my first HTML course in the Cyberia Café, in Goodge Street, I was firmly on my way to a digital future, my mind exploding with the possibilities.
During this revelatory period of my life, I was working at a salesperson at BT, Britain’s biggest telecommunications company. Sales was never my dream although it came with the glamour and status of a mobile phone, company car and expense account. It also came with the monumental pressure of sales targets and weekly stand-up status updates in from of a psychotic sales manager and the other members of the team who were as warm and friendly as pack of hungry Hyenas. I vividly remember, waking up one morning, coughing blood, such was the life of a salesman.
The good thing about working for BT was that I had access to working directly with some of the word’s brightest blue-chip companies.
Working for BT Corporate Clients as an Internet Consultant, I worked on accounts as diverse as BA, Lufthansa to Next, Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson. One of my claims to fame was that I was the consultant that introduced the Retail Giant, River Island to the Internet by organising the first corporate connection and hen their first Internet website. The last year of my time at BT was spent asa Web Design Manager for the BT Intranet.
During my time in the corporate employment after BT, I worked as the main point of contact for digital for the following brands and influenced their approach to digital.
· Ford
· Nissan
· Volvo
· Unilever
Suffice to say I learned a lot about big business operations, decision making and sales cycles. Dealing with clients and then dealing internally with creatives and managing the expectations of both was a challenge to say the least. I was instrumental in a Volvo campaign to launch their V60, where we partnered with Yahoo, Vice and The Independent and Mindshare, which was a great success. I cemented my communication and people skills to compliment my technical knowledge.
While I was working at the world’s biggest digital agency at the time, Sapient Nitro, as an Account Director for Unilever, I was being pushed to my personal limits in a very demanding role. I was working with some of Unilever’s, international sub-brands to migrate them onto a common technology platform.
In a cruel stroke, one morning I entered the office, the day I was to be made a permanent member of the team from a contractor, my life changed forever…
The day was November 31st 2011, I woke up with the usual dread of going into work to engage in the daily mental battle with the expensively educated offspring of middle-class parents of my age. Don’t get me wrong, on most days I relished the mind games and the deliberate, undermining of colleagues for sport. But today I did feel particularly vulnerable, my defence shields felt somehow depleted. By the time I entered that office at 8.35am on that fateful day I was already feeling lightheaded with a strange tingling sensation running down the back of my neck.
My team could see I was not right, and my manager instructed me to go home.
An ambulance rushed me to A&E where I was diagnosed with having suffered a stroke, and I was immediately taken for a series of scans and admitted into the Intensive Care Unit. That first night was the scariest of my life. I remember a young woman being rushed in surrounded by her family and a gaggle of doctors and nurses. When I woke in the morning she was gone and there was no sign that she was even there. She did not make it through that first night.
It tuned out that I lost the use of my right arm, I could no longer walk, and my speech was so heavily slurred, that speaking was no longer an option.
What followed was a blur of treatment from various parts of the NHS, who were fantastic, I must say. It took me the best part of two years of rehabilitation, which included physio, speech therapy, walking and writing practice to get back to somewhere near my original self. It was a painful time which tested my relationships and my mental strength. The full story of this period in my life would demand a blog post of its own.
The upshot was I could no longer secure work in the digital sector after been out for so long with an illness which, I believe, labelled me a risk to have in the workplace. After applying for 100 roles with no success, I decided it was time to set up my own agency.
Digital360 was my design agency for the last 10 years. In that time, I have going through some tremendous highs and desperate lows and everything in between. They say that entrepreneurship can be a wild ride, and I am here to tell you that this is an understatement! You have really had to have a strong stomach for some of the decisions you have to make and some of the risks you are obliged to take. Now some people would argue that a well-conceived and well-planned, and well-run company can avoid many of the pitfalls many start-ups face in the early days before they get on their feet. This may be true but, that will come with a huge caveat, there will always be many unexpected thingsthat you could not have foreseen or planned for that will undoubtedly occur during the life of the company. The true measure of you as a director, is your ability to adapt to these events and how you ultimately navigate the road ahead to keep both your customers and your staff happy and motivated.
Some of the high points for Digital360 were.
· The design and build of a mobile app used to collect payment for imported goods into theEU.
· Doing a presentation about the app to a conference of logistics experts in Miami.
· Having the app adopted by DPD Europe covering 8 countries and translated into 7 languages.
· Building beautiful and effective websites for SME businesses that are still in use today that have helped to lift their business to new levels.
· Employed a team of professionals, covering, SociaL Media, Photography, SEO, Film Making, Copy Writing, Account Management and UI/UX designing and managing two offshore development teams.
· Launching a Fashion Designer brand, with creative responsibility for, the brand, Film, Photography, and the website.
· Launching a luxury fashion recruitment website with responsibility for the brand creation and subsequently becoming Head of Digital.
· Redesigning of the De Pinna website, one of the foremost notary companies in the world.
The low point was having to let staff go on the back of the Covid pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis and closing the business.This was, by far the hardest thing I have had to do in my professional life.
Nothing has sparked my imagination in such a dramatic way as the Internet did back in the 90’s, that is until the advent of AI.
When I was introduced to Chat GPT in December 2022, it would be fair to say I was blown away. To quote Steve Jobs “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
This was certainly the case with the introduction of the iPhone and the touch screen also it certainly was true for or me when testing generative AI for the first time.
Having spent a year getting to know about AI and reading every magazine article and every other book I could get my hands on, I am now in a position to present my new company,Transform AI. This company will allow me to focus on my passion for web design closely integrated with my newfound love of AI. I create highly bespoke websites for companies using AI technology through the whole process to create a highly effective and unique end result that represents the company with surgical precision to their target audience.
A sub-brand of Transform AI is AI Assisted. Where I will teach groups and individuals the fundamentals of AI Assisted Web Design. This is a meticulously curated course offering a white glove solution for graphic designers, entrepreneurs and recent college and university graduates who would like to a future proof skill that will enable them to either work for themselves or help to gain employment in company, as every company will increasingly need to utilise AI in their marketing and site design.
For now, the future looks bright and extremely exciting, bursting with possibilities. I will update this blog post as developments that are currently in the pipeline, come to fruition.
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