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I’ve not written here much about leaving Helpful, the company I set up in 2010 and left in the early summer of 2021. I think I’m still processing it, to be honest. But one thing I have been meaning to share is something I stumbled into around March last year which had quite an impact…

Four years ago, I left the Civil Service and started trading, rather than simply blogging, as Helpful Technology. This time last year, we’d become a team of three, and by this July, we’ll be six strong. A business that started out as some optimistic freelancing has become something that pays people’s mortgages. It’s all got…

I’m learning a lot about salesmanship these days. Downstairs at Helpful Towers, where the people who manage our serviced office work, there are posters on the wall celebrating great customer service and setting out the company’s model for managing the customer relationship from first contact, right through to careful ‘off-boarding’, when the client moves out.…

The changes going on right now in central government digital communications are pretty seismic. Not least because thanks in large part to GDS, digital teams no longer view ‘communications’ as the limit of their ambition these days, as they mainly still did when I was part of one. So what’s the role for a company…

It’s been 18 months since I last walked the mean streets of Westminster as a civil servant. There are things I miss about the old lifestyle: having the scope to run with projects on the ‘inside’, being in the loop on the latest goings-on in government, and most of all, having a great team around me.…

[Warning: This is a rather personal and pretty self-indulgent post I’m afraid; check back another day for pearls of digital wisdom] I blame Paul Graham. A few years ago, his essays started a lingering train of thought that I didn’t necessarily need a job, I needed an income. Just over a year ago, I put…