Twelve years writing the code, then the jobs that needed somebody who had.

This process worked because one person remembered everything. That’s not a compliment.

1. March 2025 – present · Sheffield, remote

   Head of IT

   Pure Unity Health Group

   I own IT strategy, service delivery and IT compliance across the group, supporting more than seventy clinics and staff in Primary Care and NHS-affiliated services. I also support the Medical Legal and Rehab Direct teams working securely with insurers, instructing parties and expert witnesses. Infrastructure, cyber security, applications, data and support, alongside HR, Governance, Finance and Operations.

   • Compliance: NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, and PCI DSS.
   • Acquisitions: due diligence, onboarding, and the unglamorous business of merging another organisation’s people, data and systems into yours.
   • Platform, budget and vendor management across the group.
   • Data governance and cyber security, plus the process work that gets IT embedded in how teams operate rather than bolted to the side.

   What I learned here

   Mistake corrected

   Assuming a group of seventy-plus clinics shares one workflow. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t.

2. December 2020 – March 2025

   Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

   SEEDL Learning

   Co-founded the company and owned the learning platform and the IT infrastructure. Took a concept to a live product: live session booking, on-demand video, learning records, certificates and quizzes, with customers managing their own users, mandating courses and branding their own instance.

   • Achieved Cyber Essentials certification, start to finish and not delegated.
   • Built the IT infrastructure from scratch on Microsoft 365, for a fraction of what the alternative would have cost.
   • Scoped and delivered the platform, and hired the team that shipped it.
   • Automated our own admin: scheduling, reporting and client onboarding tools, because it seemed rude to sell efficiency and then do everything by hand.
   • Held the platform to AA accessibility throughout.

   What I learned here

   Mistake corrected

   Under-pricing early because charging felt rude for something that used to be free.

3. March 2018 – November 2020 · Bedford

   Senior Developer

   Phew

   Led projects from first conversation to delivery, working directly with clients to work out what they needed as opposed to what they first asked for.

   • Scoped and built an NHS patient discharge system.
   • Wrote the accessibility guidelines the team worked to, and held software to AA.
   • Built a statistics dashboard pulling from several systems that had never been introduced to each other, plus an internal project-tracking and timekeeping tool.

   What I learned here

   Insight carried forward

   An NHS discharge system taught me the software is the easy 80%. The 20% is understanding exactly what happens when it’s wrong.

4. September 2016 – March 2018 · Bedford

   Team Lead, Front End

   Xigen

   Supported the team’s work and their growth, ran planning and estimation, and saw projects out to a standard worth putting a name to. Built a timesheet tool to organise and schedule the team’s work. It was the first of many times the answer turned out to be “write the tool”.

5. December 2015 – September 2016 · Milton Keynes

   Senior Front End Developer

   Ledger Bennett

   Websites, landing pages and email templates, implemented into WordPress, Umbraco, Eloqua and Marketo, with the gated forms and marketing automation behind them. Making an email look right in the mail client that mangles everything is a skill I have never once stopped needing.

   What I learned here

   Insight carried forward

   If it has to survive the mail client that mangles everything, test it in the mail client that mangles everything.

6. August 2013 – December 2015 · Luton

   CTS Front Office Developer

   Lumesse

   Built customised career and recruitment platforms for clients on a SaaS product: a flexible HTML and CSS3 template system, four standard templates, a responsive rebuild that held together at every size, and a refresh of Easycruit’s internal system. Also the first place I worked on the product itself rather than only on what sat on top of it.

   What I learned here

   Mistake corrected

   Under-estimating how much a “small” responsive fix touches when the layout was never built for it.

7. April 2011 – August 2013 · Milton Keynes

   Web Marketing & Web Developer

   Freestone Creative

   Bespoke websites, search visibility and email marketing campaigns, with the client communication and reporting attached. The job where I learned to explain a technical decision to somebody who did not want a technical answer. Useful ever since.

   What I learned here

   Mistake corrected

   Leading with how, not why.

8. November 2010 – March 2011 · Milton Keynes · Contract

   SEO & Web Developer

   Burton & Sons Trading

   Five months, one objective: get the key products onto page one. They got there, and the traffic and sales followed them up.

9. February 2010 – October 2010 · Wellingborough

   Website Marketing, Development & First-line IT

   i-Smart Consumer Services

   Improving the company website’s visibility and pitching in on new projects, while helping the IT team keep the servers and machines upright. The start of doing both halves of the job at once, which never really stopped.

10. January 2008 – January 2010

    Website Developer, SEO, Email Marketing & IT Support

    THUK Media

    Where it started. Development, SEO, email marketing, client training and IT support, and inside two years, leading a small team. Nobody plans a career that opens with “you do all of it”, but it is a hard grounding to beat.

    What I learned here

    Mistake corrected

    Assuming specialism has to come before breadth. For me it was the other way round.

11. 2006 – 2008 · Bedford College

    BTEC First Diploma, Information Technology

    Overall grade: Distinction

    Distinctions in website development, networking essentials, and software design and development, plus an Outstanding Achievement award. The networking one mattered more, later, than it felt like it should at the time.