Career so far I was a dodgem attendant at Wicksteed Park: "One-way round only, please - no deliberate bumping!" Then I progressed to stirring paint at Campbells Plastics for two years, after various character-building agency jobs that mum and dad forced me to undertake, much to my displeasure. I had had enough of factory work and picking the green bits off tomatoes before popping them into a bucket and decided I needed an office job. So I joined Misco as a temp in telemarketing, then went into inbound and finally into key accounts. I was a Misco lad for five years until I left and joined ISC Networks for two years. Then I set up Total Computer Networks in November 2003.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do? I would be my nine-year-old son as he's an airy fairy little critter - he's always away with the fairies and it looks great! He can get distracted by anything - a small piece of fluff might catch his eye between him putting on socks and then he will spend the rest of the day in just one sock without noticing or caring. He hasn't got a clue - he's just got a mobile and the other day he told us that someone called "Orange" keeps texting him. I like that naive innocence.
Cloud - friend or foe? Every cloud has a silver lining (sorry for the cheesy line but I pinched it off our sales manager Kieran O'Connor, so blame him please). We are embracing the cloud and have been investing heavily in 2011 ready for the uptake of the cloud in our customer base in 2012, and will mainly be focused on IAAS.
Has 2011 been as bad as everyone said it would be? It has been an unpredictable yet very good year for us, so I wouldn't say it has been as bad as everybody said it would be.
What would you have as your last meal? My Nanna's shepherd's pie but with the hygiene standards of today - her food prep hygiene was that of a war child. If she said: "Do you want a ham sandwich?" the safe answer was "No". If you answered "Yes" - which you only did once - she would go to the freezer and defrost two pieces of bread in the microwave, then back to the freezer for the ham - again into the microwave and hey presto a really awful warm sandwich with 90 per cent chance of gut rot.
Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with? It depends how long for. If it was less than five minutes I'd choose my wife, Michelle, and as we have been married for a while now we would make use of our five minutes by planning what to have for tea or talking paint colours for the landing. If it was an extended stuckage period then it would have to be a plump tasty person as I get cranky if I don't eat.
Have any of your predictions come true this year? This year has been harder to predict than any other as this year did not follow the same trends set out in previous years.
What do you see as the channel's biggest challenge in 2012? The economy will in my view be the biggest challenge of 2012 - companies are tightening their belts, tightening up on purchasing procedures and fixating on price more.Everybody in the economy - not just in our industry - are having to fight for their orders harder now than ever before and margins are affected as a result.
What is the best part of your day? It used to be Wednesday lunchtimes but now it's 6.30pm when Come Dine With Me starts and we unwind from the day.
