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I didn’t really fit into the company I was in before, so firstly, I think to enjoy any role the people you work with are important. Realistically, I probably spend more time speaking with my colleagues than I do my own wife and kids, so having great colleagues definitely makes Scimcon enjoyable.
Secondly, the challenges within the role are exciting. Whenever you start a new contract – as we do regularly, supporting clients in pharma and biopharma – there is either an implementation project that needs carrying out, or an issue that needs resolving. Sometimes, the task at hand is not something I am directly familiar with or have the exact experience doing, but that makes it a challenge. And it’s the challenge that I enjoy.
In my prior role, we partnered with Scimcon on a number of projects. I had been involved in building a platform for our mutual client and when they needed to take the project forward, they needed someone to train, support, and project manage the implementation of the project software. It seemed a no-brainer for me to join the consultancy team at Scimcon, and to continue to support the project and the client to help them to progress. The transition into Scimcon was seamless, and I later moved from that initial project within the vaccines space onto a biotech company in the Netherlands, whom I have been supporting on e-systems.
My background helps me to bring people and team skills into play, so I am very suited to the Scimcon way of working, to support clients and to manage processes, SOPs, digital, and software projects for scientific companies. The client I am supporting currently was initially reluctant to appoint a lab informatics consultancy that was not local, and questions were raised as to whether or not we could perform the role from the UK without impacting the level of support we provide. As a test run, we were initially only working on a 3-month contract. Their processes are crucial to the business scale-up and growth, and our experience with other big pharma organisations has come into play helping them to navigate the decisions needed. I think we successfully demonstrated to them that it is feasible to be productive offering great support from the UK – so much so that the original 3-month project is now 30 months.
Every child has a hobby growing up, and of course in England, playing sports is probably one of the most popular activities. For me, football was my favourite pastime which evolved into more than just a hobby. It actually paved a pathway for all areas of my life.
What started out as a recreational game became a profession, as I left school at 16 to become a full-time football player, At 20, when my professional playing career finished, football again opened a window of opportunity to move to Southern California and coach football for 3 months. I returned 12 years later!
At 27, football again paid for my University education at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, where I was sponsored via a soccer scholarship to study Business and Finance. I had never even enjoyed school, never mind imagined studying at University, but football provided a unique opportunity that was too good to refuse.
During my senior year at University, while coaching football in Denver during the summer, I was introduced to my fiancé Sarah who had also – coincidentally – attended University in the USA on a football scholarship. She was almost in a parallel to me, only she was based in Florida while I was on the total opposite side of the country in California.
Sarah and I had our first child then returned to the UK shortly after, where we now have four sons – aged 10, 7, 5, and 1. Our 10 and 7-year-olds are, like their mum and dad, football-mad, so we spend our weekends travelling to watch them play. Our 5-year-old is starting to get the bug, and we are yet to see if football is something our youngest warms to, but I can’t see the apple falling too far from the tree.
I still spend every day at some sort of football activity. Both our older boys are at the football academies so they each have 3-4 days a week training and playing. Football remains our outside-of-work life, having brought us together all those years ago.
And with the skills I learned at university, studying business and finance, as well as the team skills associated with playing sport, I am well placed to bring team leadership to the Scimcon family, and to focus on the best tactics and teams to work on a winning side.
Southern California was my home for 12 years, and having attended University in San Diego, that would be my obvious choice. We have a lot of friends and happy memories there, and we love the area – and the food!
We made the decision to return to UK as a family when we had the boys, for the support network of close family and friends. As I have been working from home for so many years anyway, personally my life hardly changed. However, it was a terrible impact for the boys. For any young kids, that transitional age and loss of companionship has been a huge negative experience. Luckily, the boys are pretty resilient and seemed to have bounced back into the new normal without any issues.
Funnily enough, I am not really a techie! I use a PC and a phone, but not much else.
Even though I don’t spend a great deal of time on gadgets and gizmos, I love the knowledge and benefits you can see from technology. For example, having spent so many of my formative years playing and coaching football, I am now still involved with my sons and their training and I see the technology to hand, which was never available when I was playing in the US. It’s absolutely fascinating, and there’s two pieces of tech in particular that I’m seeing used regularly at my sons’ training and matches. One is a Veo sports camera, which follows the ball and records the play, the other is an APEX GPS tag. This handy piece of kit is worn in the back of my son’s shirt when he’s playing, and all the data collected throughout the match is recorded on a smartphone, recording metrics such as speed, average position, and provides an overall performance review.
It’s amazing to see two of my previously completely separate worlds – football and technology – coming together, and it is really interesting to see how this technology is enabling football. As a coach, it also allows me to see and read the data available, so that we can then determine what is needed to improve in a game.
Scimcon is not a technology company, it is a people company that helps to solve the technology challenges for our clients, whether they be implementation, process or project-related. I am happy that I am not a techie, but very much a team and a people-person who can always learn and bring new skills to the table.