Birmingham Entrepreneur & Business Consultant

This experience was vital for my Entrepreneur skill set that was being developed in sales and customer service, providing me with experience and dealing with all different types of people. One day I would be in a council house installing a budget computer, the next I was in a large manor house installing a high-end business machine and then in a business office installing networked computers and printers. Every day I found new information and learnt more about people realising that communication was the key to trust and success. I was developing a way to speak to my clients on a level different to what they were used to, breaking down the technical jargon into something that made sense to them.

As the sales were growing I needed to source components cheaper and to cut out the middle man. This was the first real time that I needed to become a true Entrepreneur in Birmingham. I used my personally developed business skills to identify and source the suppliers of the majority of traders at the computer fairs and began to buy directly from the suppliers. I was known at the computer fairs by all of the leading traders and I was soon able to sell products to the smaller traders at the computer fairs that were not able to purchase components as cheap as was able to provide them.

My technical engineering skills had also been developed and I had successfully completed and passed a 4-year technical engineering apprenticeship and now I was a fully qualified Technical Engineer and Electrician. I started my first maintenance role at Rover which involved keeping the production line running, fixing breakdowns (mechanical or electrical) and preventing breakdowns with preventative maintenance. This was a strange job for me and it did not really fit my makeup as I wanted to work hard and learn more, but the mindset at Rover was to do as little as possible (this will offend some people, but it was my personal view from experiences I was dealing with daily).

I had worked on an array of machines across the Rover plant at Longbridge, Land Rover and Gaydon for around 6 years in total covering the 4-year apprenticeship and my 2 years time served as a maintenance engineer.

At this point in 1994 BMW bought Rover and this was a great turning point for me personally. I was chosen to go to Munich to learn the German Engineering way and learn more about the culture and processes. I found myself flying out from Elmdon Airport in Birmingham to Germany daily/weekly visiting many different manufacturing facilities in Germany and Austria.

My knowledge and skill set was pushed further and I needed to learn a second language. I also needed to understand how to deal with people from a completely different culture and mindset. The German methods were all about processes and I started to understand how to achieve great things as a Technical Engineer thinking differently to the way the UK had trained me.

I was soon moved to be a key project member for a new engine factory which was to manufacture small, low emission, highly efficient four cylinder engines in the UK which was named BMW Plant Hams Hall. This was a great opportunity and the new manufacturing facility was to be state of the art with the Engines that were built supplying a number of vehicle manufacturing plants both in the UK and abroad to power BMW and MINI vehicles sold across the world.

Production first commenced in 2001 following an initial investment by BMW to build the plant of £400 million.

My role was to help successfully learn and setup the new production facility for the Cylinder Block line with colleagues and we achieved this goal working with various 3rd party companies including main German Engineering companies Hüller Hille and Grob.

The transfer machines were successfully planned, manufactured, built, tested and brought over the UK and installed. We then commissioned and started producing four cylinder engine blocks. In 2001 the engine factory produced 70,000 engines which was a fantastic achievement for all involved.

The skills, lessons and knowledge I gained from this were huge with so many key points and time scales which had to be met. I also took it on myself to identify time savings thus reducing cycle time further and this was noted as some of the best improvements being made at the time which was a contributing factor to achieving the 70,000 engines.

I found myself coding Allen Bradley Terminals to change the timing of systems, whilst maintaining safety and reliability therefore unlocking the potential of the machines.

The successful completion of the manufacturing facility at Hams Hall meant my role was to change and I was now involved in improvements for quality, machine cycle time and reliability. I was setting up preventative maintenance plans and educating maintenance engineers about the machines. In 2002 we had pushed the facility and produced 154,000 engines which was getting the UK get noticed within the German headquarters.  We continued our hard work and in 2007 the facility was producing 367,073 engines.

I was used as a technical resource to keep the machines running when breakdowns occurred and this was a key point in my life for realising my ability to cope with stressful situations in a calm manner. It was vital to keep a cool head and remain calm in order to make judgements quickly that had to be right. When the machinery was broken for something major this meant production stopped and this stoppage costs thousands per minute in lost production and the maintenance guys would call for my help. I had to assess the situation and work out a solution to A) get the machinery producing product quickly and B) prevent this from happening again.

I was soon noticed within BMW as being a key person able to deal with situations and communicate to the plant director when things went wrong and gained the trust of high-level management. When 3rd party companies were needed to assist with repairs of machines this often went wrong and time scales slipped and the companies would misinform us about the reality of what they could achieve. I was then tasked to fix this problem and was managing all the contractors overseeing all external service providers, creating the maintenance contracts to ensure the machinery was fixed quickly and to our standards.

I built amazing relationships with the suppliers and they trusted my knowledge and judgement. They operated in an open and trusted manner with me which helped speed up the corrections needed and I still speak to some of these companies today  as they they are now clients of my company.

The problems were fixed and processes were put in place which included simple solutions, often that had been missed. For example, allowing the contractors on-site with passes preventing security blocking access and having me as a point of contact should anything go wrong. I was also tasked with saving money for the cost centre that was involved in the maintenance contracts and I was able to reduce spend and increase the quality of the service being provided.

I became a 24-hour main point of contact for breakdowns (not paid to be on-call) and this was something that got me personally known by all in the factory. BMW operated a personal development bonus system and I was achieving the highest bonus's across the entire factory due to my success and efforts.

In the background, I was still developing and growing my skills as an IT specialist and building a successful business in the background away from BMW and Engineering. I was growing daily my IT skill set, pushing my personal learning more and more as my customers requested an array of extra services. I was soon installing Networking Infrastructure, Backup Infrastructure, CCTV installations and Door Entry Systems. The array of knowledge I now had I felt to be unique and the life skills that had been developed meant that my sponge brain was absorbing data from everywhere and I found myself involved with so many different areas of technology and business.

My own business had grown to become known by the major computer component suppliers within the West Midlands and had accounts with IT equipment suppliers and CCTV companies in Birmingham and London. The drive to find quality components at the best prices and never to buy cheap equipment meant that every customer was a happy customer and, with this, more new customers kept coming and bringing more new clients. This was a successful example of the effects of quality on long-term success which was something that I felt BMW had certainly got right and my own business was following this ethos.

A pinnacle point in the development of my business was the need for a website. I took this as a new skill to learn and purchased books and Dreamweaver to start my web development skills. I was quickly building websites for fun and had scrapped Dreamweaver, writing the HTML code in notepad. I was soon asked to build websites for local shops that knew me (who I had already sold computer systems and CCTV systems too) and these websites developed my design skills.

The more websites that I completed the more knowledge I had about peoples business's as I needed to understand the content requirements and identify the customers needs. I found myself being like a sponge for every piece of information, I was energised by this information and became able to use situations I was aware of from other clients or BMW and make suggestions to improve things in each business I was working with. I was now becoming a business consultant for change and improvements and my knowledge was second to none.

The more websites I built the more I moved forward with my skills and I was soon building Flash websites which started my websites coming to life and it was at this point I realised that this was the business model I wanted to follow. I loved the internet and it excited me with the vast power that no one could really understand and so I stopped building computers slowly and started to focus fully on internet services.

Things in the internet world moved fast and I soon dropped Flash sites and I was styling websites using CSS Style sheets and making websites less busy which made them work much better. There became a focus on conversions and my skill set from being a technical sales person, technical installer and builder were soon becoming a marketing development manager and conversion expert. The more companies I worked with the more I grew my knowledge and this was driving my success forwards empowering me on a daily basis.

In my experience and journey of becoming an IT specialist, I often took devices apart and improved them and at the time I had SKY TV which was moving from SKY + to becoming SKY HD in 2006 and the first Thomson SKY HD Box that arrived had a 300GB hardrive installed allowed 160GB of recorded TV keeping the remainder for SKY to use. HD TV took much larger storage than standard definition and this meant that the hardrive would fill quickly (1 week / 2 weeks) and the unit was, in my view, useless. I contacted SKY about this and they said that this was the largest SKY Box available so I took it apart and removed the hardrive. I looked at how the boot sector functioned and examined the partition setup, then purchased a 500GB drive from a old supplier and modified this to work in the SKY HD Box. This worked great so I then purchased an Hitachi’s Deskstar 1TB drive whic,h at the time was costly, and then got this working also (This was in 2007 and it wasn't until 2011 that SKY introduced the 1TB units).

I now found myself modifying SKY BOXES for friends and family members and the word got out. SKY contacted me to ask how I was doing this and if this was reliable as they had hit issues in testing. I technically understood hardrives and had been working with them for over seven years so offered support which resulted in them ordering a SKY HD box from me.

At the same time, Endemol in London contacted me about modifying their recording studios and I found myself in Shepherds Bush, London removing hardrives and with my laptop modifying the systems. The SKY Boxes were used to record all the news across the world and these were then used for the programs that they produced, without this recorded news channel information they were unable to deliver the programs. My system modifications worked and Endemol was now a client loving what I was achieving for them. I modified further studios and if it wasn't for my connections in the PC trade I would not have been able to source the hardrives quickly and cost effectively.

It was at this point I needed to register Chameleon Web Services as a Private Limited Company. I chose the Chameleon name as I had learned that to survive in business you need to keep changing and your background environment doesn't stay the same. Your business model needs to be sharp and always moving forward to keep ahead of the competitors. For this reason, I thought the Chameleon name was perfect, they use change for protection and for growth as a predator. This set the business name and Chameleon was now on the way to becoming one of the fastest growing internet companies in the West Midlands.

At the same point in time, I was still at BMW and growing my technical knowledge, attending training course after training course, becoming more and more involved in problem-solving, process improvements, designing systems and work flows, project managing multi million pound projects. I moved around as my skills grew and I was recognised as a someone special. I moved from being a Technical Engineer, Asset Reliability, Maintenance Contract Manager into IT within BMW.

I worked in the SAP team supporting business change and then into Server Systems Infrastructure management until I finally moved into Anti-virus which involved taking all Anti-virus operations away from a 3rd party provider and bringing this in-house.

This was a great accomplishment for me personally as I had to single handily visit the supplier in Germany and grow their trust to learn everything in-order to come back with the information to enable us to do everything in-house as part of a cost cutting exercise.

My years of developing people skills in the UK and Germany meant that I was quickly able to understand how I was going to achieve this goal. My sponge like brain absorbed and absorbed data and within a week I understood the infrastructure and requirements to be able to deliver this as a service.

I returned to BMW and successfully brought over all operations for the Global BMW Anti-virus infrastructure at the time saving £480,000 and improved the process with this making everything work better.

Everything I was achieving for BMW was moving things forwards, saving them money and improving processes and, at the same time, I was receiving the best training courses available with money not being an object at BMW.

The development of my skills meant that I had been involved at an early age in so many areas of a Blue Chip company working with everyone from production operators to the CEO.

I had been creating reports and delivering presentations to Plant Directors across the Globe, meeting suppliers and managing the contracts and SLA's, all this knowledge was being absorbed and was growing my understanding of what is required to achieve the best from people and processes.

Still, in the background, my own business was growing rapidly and I was coming to a break point and left BMW which, at the time, people thought I was mad. I walked away from a heavy salary with a new car every 8 months and a final salary pension to focus all my attention on Chameleon.

We have been involved in some of the most amazing projects that have shaped the internet and also been involved in developing services that are used daily.

We have won Global Awards for many areas of the business and become the trusted I.T. partner for large companies managing global solutions.