The Grafter

As CRO, my focus is maximising the value of products and services our clients offer, understanding how to improve customer messaging and evolving go-to-marketing messaging to improve sales & growth. I also do regular Business 360 workshops with clients, a sort of business therapy session where we discover areas for improvement and development within their business. Internally at The Grafter, I also work closely with the rest of the leadership team to bring new products and services to market that will boost our clients and get them to their goals (potentially a strong exit too).

Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)

Polyvalent Ltd.

Polyvalent - having or using a lot of different forms or features

Polyvalent is a company that provides both go-to-market consultancy services (sales, marketing, technology, etc.), and also builds SaaS products that assist in these go-to-market activities (social media advocacy, solution selling, etc.). We are a bootstrapped company that focuses on user impact & benefit instead of share-holders.

Founder

Kranz household

Duties include project management, damage limitation, education, travel logistics, mentoring, tantrum avoidance (~50% success rate), food preparation, supply chain management (trip and holiday organisation). Successfully made president's club each year (father's day and anniversary cards), although never received a pay rise. Managing a complex P&L budget. Work for an outstanding group of bosses, although multitasking between them is often challenging. Would not change this position for the world!

Father & Husband

Sysdig

The company had great funding, the cloud native market was growing, and cloud security was becoming a top priority. But Sysdig had a problem - there simply isn't people in the job market with the relevant domain knowledge to join the team and help grow our market. I was approached to solve this problem, as someone with solid technical knowledge of both the space and Sysdig products, and my ability to simplify the understanding and focus on customer value, I joined the new Enablement team to lead Technical Enablement. My primary focus was building a program that would allow the sales team to scale 300% in 12 months. We achieved that, and brought in-house a customised sales methodology, delivering both a cost saving, and reducing the ramp time of the sales team. Presidents Club for the following years were >90% people that I had either directly hired, or were part of the onboarding program I helped build.

Director of Technical Enablement

Sysdig was growing, but as a US based company, they were struggling to manage a world-wide team. I was promoted to help cover EMEA, including teams in Singapore and India. We grew the team from 3 to 13 before I moved on, and had staff across the region. We were fully remote and usually worked asynchronously. The team had a hugely supportive culture, and we extended our virtual team to include customer success and support. We had the highest retention world-wide, and some of the best performers world-wide too. Our team helped grow Sysdig significantly in the region and expand our presence across partners, customers, and the open source community.

EMEA SE Manager

Sysdig was early stage, but starting to grow. They had a new sales team in EMEA, but needed some technical assistance with a complex product. I joined to help the EMEA team in the presales stages, but quickly worked out for success I needed to work with customer success and support teams too. We built a virtual team that although had different reporting lines, still worked closely together. Our ways of working was often quoted by the world-wide team as an ideal operating model. Sysdig continued to grow over the years following the great foundation I was honoured to be part of building.

EMEA Principal Sales Engineer

Datamancers Ltd.

Managing Director

Vocalink

Vocalink is a fundamental core part of the UK banking system, but the company had a challenge: How can we grow the business given we already have significant market share of the UK? The solution was to be able to package up their payments platform and deliver this around the world, expanding their market offering. I was brought in as part of a team tasked with building this platform. Packaging up an application to make it portable and repeatable meant we were building a containerised platform and needed everything to support this. This meant CI/CD, observability, security and of course Kubernetes. The portable payment platform was launched and delivered to the first non-UK customers.

Product Management (Contract)

Hedvig Inc.

Hedvig has brought to market a truly unique storage solution. As with most software-defined solutions it of course scale-out, but what makes it unique is the ability to scale-out as an active/active/active cluster across multiple physical (and logical) locations, including public clouds. All this from an enterprise tier-1 storage platform.

My role at Hedvig was to help customers and potential customers get the most out of SDS with Hedvig, replacing DR or HA with DR & HA. The unique solution often means planning out how the existing infrastructure can be gradually evolved to be more cloud like, with applications being accessible and active from any site. Infrastructure and Application Architecture is key to making any modern IT transformation project a success.

Solutions Architect

Covéa Insurance

Assisting the team with the design, deployment and transition of a new infrastructure to support a new business initiative. Working with VMware, Tegile, Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, Zerto and Veeam with lots of PowerShell. PowerShell automation work both for environment automation and auditing / health checks, integrating across various APIs and modules (including F5, RabbitMQ, Active Directory, VMware and a few others).

Technical Architect and Engineer (Contract)

Kranz Ltd.

We work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, at all levels. Our main focus is helping people better understand what technology can do for their business and how they can adapt their own skills to stay relevant to both the business and the latest technology. We can help build an IT or cloud strategy, assistance with writing and running tenders (RFP, ITT, etc.), data centre and cloud migration, application refactoring and modernising IT infrastructures. 

Our passion is IT excellence and we work with our customers to ensure this is delivered in the most cost effective way. Our consultancy is available on both short term and long term engagements. Our aim is to spend the time making sure our customers end up being fully self sufficient.

Independent Consultant

LateRooms.com

Brought on to assist with several transformation projects within the business, including driving data centre efficiencies, strategic use of IaaS (both private and public), unified communications, PCI-DSS, Active Directory consolidation and other projects. Assisted in setting standards for consumption of AWS cloud services, as well as migrating specific services into Route 53, EC2 (for development and disaster recovery) and S3. Worked closely with the contact centre team to select, negotiate and migrate to a cloud telephony platform, including a fully managed IVR, ACD and secure credit card handling.

Spent a lot of time working across the business, selecting and working with stake-holders in building project documentation and business cases to be presented to the board. Working closely with the project management team to refine business cases and project planning. Lots of involvement with the DevOps community in streamlining the transition from code to infrastructure, working alongside Go and Chef pipelines to enable a much quicker delivery framework. Initial investigations into containerisation of code within wrappers like Docker. Small amount of Node.JS and bash coding to automate AWS services.

Infrastructure Architect  (Contract)

I have worked in technical sales for nearly 20 years, and the common theme is that I love to help people succeed and grow!
- As CRO, my job is to help our clients make the best use of their products and services, and be able to translate this into sales-worthy language
- As a manager, my job was to create environment where my team could meet their highest potential.
- As a sales enablement leader, my job was to empower the team with the right skills, knowledge and confidence to go win.
- As a father, my job is to guide my children to be exactly what they want to be.

I've been privileged & lucky through-out my career to win awards, get some of the highest industry certifications available, make presidents club multiple times, but the my favourite is getting team feedback that I'm one of the best managers they've ever had.

I want to share these experiences with you, and help guide you and your team to whatever definition of success you have.

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