Here’s what you need to know

I have spent twenty two years making things happen inside big organisations. I studied engineering first. Then I did a master’s in computer science, and later an MBA.

Under all of it is a love of tinkering and building things. That love took me into a corporate career as a specialist.

I did manage people, at Deloitte and at Nedbank. I didn’t enjoy it much. It got harder as the team grew and became less technical.

At one point a restructure moved me from leading two quants, the people who build the maths models, to leading ten campaign managers. I later stepped down from that role. I went back to being a senior quant.

At school I loved maths and physics. In 2000, loving those meant one career, teaching. So I chose engineering, partly for a reason I have rarely said out loud.

In grade 11, an English teacher told us that technologies can be lost. His example was the slide rule, a whole way of calculating that had already vanished. It stuck with me. I worried that one day we might forget how to build tall buildings. If I became an engineer, maybe I could help make sure we didn’t.

When I started work, my dad gave me one piece of advice. The corporate world is stressful, he said, so be the guy in the back room who holds the technical keys. The one nobody bothers, because everyone knows they can’t do without him.

I lived by that for twenty two years. But the work I loved most was never just technical. The thread through all of it was turning what I built into real value.

I found that easiest as a builder who thinks like an entrepreneur. A big company has entrepreneurs inside it too. You have internal clients, a budget, a team and a problem. You even have competitors, other teams trying to solve the same problem.

So the question is always the same. What can you build that solves the problem better? And can you convince the people who decide to choose yours?

I was twelve the first time I tried to build a business. My older brother Jean had found a comic at a flea market called Hustler Humor, which tells you most of what you need to know. The kids at my school had pocket money and not much to spend it on. The vendor wouldn’t sell to a twelve-year-old, so my brother did the buying for me. I had exclusive supply and a captive market, and for a few glorious weeks business was exceptional.

Then I made one strategic error. I showed my mom a joke I thought was funny.

The next morning she marched me to the principal’s office. I confessed, handed over my stock and named every customer. My mom offered my profits as reparations for what she was now calling, with remarkable specificity, a porn ring. Mr Ellis, the principal, did his very best to look serious. He confiscated 25 magazines, which I can only assume became his private collection.

I half wish I’d had the nerve to study physics. The two subjects I loved went on to explode into possibility.

But when it comes to my career, I have always been conservative. I have a knack for finding the safe, sensible path and taking it.

That road gave me twenty two years inside four big organisations. I was mostly in data, looking for interesting ways to add value.

Then the opportunity of a lifetime came along. My wife was offered a great career move in Canada.

At 44 I left. I moved my family to a small town in Nova Scotia and became the at-home parent to our two boys. I have three years of runway. So I am finally building the thing I have wanted since I was twelve.

The worry from grade 11 has come back in a new shape. We are building AI now, a revolution as big as the railways. Maybe bigger. Maybe much bigger. And one of the biggest concerns is that even the people building it don’t fully understand how it works.

I still care about the same thing I did in grade 11. More than anything, I want us to understand what we build. We are living in a critical moment, and I think it will be remembered for centuries. I pray humanity finds a safe path through it. I would rather be building in this moment than watching it.

Now I am the whole company, and there is no back room. There is sales, and admin, and people to call. Left alone, I would still rather be building something beautiful.

But the back room hid something from me. I like people. A lot. That part of me is a seedling, and I am looking after it on purpose.

I have put together something I am proud of, and I am learning as I go. It is a premium service, built to make a real difference to a small business.

AI is incredible. I could never have built what I have built in the last six months without it. But I don’t think AI could have built it without me, either.

AI can do amazing things. Turning that into real value for a real business still takes experience. It also takes a stubborn refusal to stop until it works. That is what I bring.

The idea at the heart of it is simple. If it lives in someone’s head, it isn’t a system yet.

I keep almost nothing in my head. I spend my attention on two things, my boys and working out what this AI moment actually means. Everything else gets written down. If it is not written down, it does not exist.

So I build the same way. The follow-up fires on its own. The review ask goes out without anyone remembering to send it. The domain is in your name, not sitting in someone else’s account. A business that depends on somebody remembering is not a system. It is a person with a good memory, and one day they are on holiday.

Everything I sell runs on my own business first. The guides, the assessments, the follow-up, the measurement. You are looking at it.

I am looking for small business owners who are good at the actual work. You probably have no spare attention. The system around your work was never the job you signed up for. That is the part I build.

If you would rather check the work than take my word for it, that is the right instinct.