Digital Pond: EP#3 Sam Booth — Building a Business for the Digital Era
This week, we’re joined by Sam Booth.
Sam is the CEO of Just After Midnight, also known as JAM. They work with substantial tech companies providing cloud and application support and they allow our developers to go to bed at normal hours while they do the monitoring.
During the conversation, we’ll explore how the pandemic has accelerated the need for organisations to embrace the digital mindsets and Sam’s original business vision and some exciting news from him.
You can listen to the webinar in full on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
You can find the full transcript for the podcast below.
Transcript
Danny Bluestone
Sam Booth from JAM, welcome to the digital path. It’s great to have you here today. We’ve been working with you guys now for a couple of years and we’ve brought you in as a major DevOps provider. One of the things that really attracted you guys to us was your name and your brand, can you tell me a bit more about the story of your brand image and where it came from?
Sam Booth
Yeah, of course, thanks for having me. So Just After Midnight came from problems that we had when we were working in the agency space so me and co-founder used to work in the agency world for a good while, so 10, 12 years and on the commercial site and we would always have the same issues going in building big platforms, applications, doing the sort of digital transformation piece as it would be now for these organisations. And we would always be asked what happens if this platform or this site goes down? After hours or just after midnight? Who’s there to fix it, pick it up and we like many agencies use exactly the same approach, which was to rely on an external relationship with an IT hosting provider or we would give the Dev a phone and say, Look, can you please pick this up for us if it goes off in the middle of the night? Or we would charge as much money as we possibly could think of just so that they would say no, just take the announced support.
So, the idea of the business and the name Just After Midnight came from that, in fact, I’ve answered that question a pitch of what would happen Just After Midnight if things went wrong. So that’s where the idea came from. And originally, we started the business to be able to support agencies specifically with this problem, just to get rid of that headache. They’re out there building, innovating great products.
But to be able to say, right, there’s a team that can pick up at 5:30am and give it back to you at 9:00am and do the weekends and holidays and away days and everything else that you do. And someone that understands digital and understands that it has to be full stack and understands that it can’t just be about the infrastructure or just about this or that and they’re trying to move away from relationships with people who would have had with hosting and IT type providers and into relationship with somebody that really understood digital.
And the key parts of that for us which is to make sure that we had something which didn’t compete with agencies so we don’t do any of the services that agencies provide. We don’t build stuff, we don’t design stuff, we don’t do strategy, we don’t do UX, we just focus on being an excellent support partner. And from that, obviously, we developed a really good skill in cloud engineering, with AWS and as we’re particular in the hyper scalars. And so, people used to come and ask us, actually, can you help us with the actual DevOps part of side of things in the cloud engineering site? So now that’s really where our business sits in those two parts and like you said, Just After Midnight is the banner under which it will come.
Danny Bluestone
So how big is the business in terms of the amount of people that you have?
Sam Booth
Yes, so we just kind of have 45 people and we have offices in the UK, we have offices in Singapore and we have offices in Australia and obviously a part of the business because we don’t do those large projects. And we are a managed service provider base, actually, we’re probably a slightly bigger than what we might seem with that number of people just because of the volume of things that we can support with it, with a relatively smaller team compared with an agency life and it is a completely different world. And we kind of accidentally I guess, in doing the business started an MSP but didn’t really know what an IT MSP was at that time so I kind of reinvented something that existed but kind of didn’t. And so, I’ve been looking into how do we coin what we are but I think a digital native MSP is kind of where we ended up with things but yeah, we have 45 people and we have great clients in Australia, great clients in Singapore and then in the UK and we have a small base there at the moment, we’re looking to grow it heavily which is the US, we already have quite a lot of clients and partner agencies in the US. That’s again a market which, obviously, the market globally has a roughly the same requirements. It’s a very small world these days with what we do. So, the service sells well in all those markets.
Danny Bluestone
And tell us a bit more about the big news you have.
Sam Booth
So just last week, it seems like yesterday and a million years ago at the same time but yeah, we got acquired by Ultimate Business Solutions, which are someone in the reseller channel space and more of the IT world that I talk of and seeing the opportunity in the digital space as well. And it was a really good opportunity to partner with someone to really expand and accelerate our growth because we are growing at such a fast rate that it’s hard to keep up with it. And so, this will allow us to scale better be able to introduce our cloud services to their clients and obviously, also open up further services for our clients to have some of the services that the guys at Ultimate provides as well.
So, yeah, we’re staying Just After Midnight, I’m staying around, everything staying as it was before and no change to our agency partners or our clients in what we do. But just gives us a bit more power behind us to go out and grow faster really. Yeah, so that was a very frantic start to the year for me.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, brilliant. And obviously, one of the things that you spoke about before is the culture that you built in the team and your heritage and agency culture, how do you think that’s going to evolve with this new partner behind you?
Sam Booth
Yeah, I think it should stay the same. At the end of the day, we’re going into there, we serve a certain part of the market. And that part of the market is as I say, I hate to use the word really, but the digital side of it if you look at it from the IT perspective and it’s just the market when you look at it from a digital agencies perspective, so we understand that culture, it’s critical to doing what we do, because we have to understand how agencies operate, how people are building, how dev teams in clients that we work for directly how they operate their squads or their pods or the teams or whatever they’re doing. So that very much is staying, I actually think it’s a case of learnings both ways, So I think there’s a lot that a business like Ultimate that’s been around for… since the 90’s can offer us and there’s also vice versa, there’s a lot we’ll be able to offer in that way as well, in terms of learning more about how digital teams and digital agencies operate, which is something that is a little bit newer to them.
So, I think it’s going to be a two-way street. But as I say, I don’t think there’s going to be too many changes for people from our end. And the brand is essential to what the guys were buying when they come at Just After Midnight as well. So, all that pieces is staying exactly as it was. And I think it also gives us the ability to just have more skill sets behind it as well. I think I talked to you last time about that.
One of the main things for us and why people like using us is because you don’t get the finger pointing that they get with some support businesses where it’s like, oh, no, we only support this or we only support that, we go out and we manage the whole piece. So, it doesn’t matter whether it’s infra level, app level or anything, we can go out and we will fix that issue. So, this whole thing just gives that even deeper skill sets so we can fix more issues and less finger pointing and that’s really what we wanted it to be about, as you know that the service is meant to be a very white glove, very attentive service and that’s something that we intend to keep and we’ve already been working with the guys for a little while behind the scenes looking at some of the things that they have, they have some amazing tooling around automation, which I think would be interesting to our clients and to the agencies as well.
So, some of the day-to-day maintenance activity, there’s a lot of automation tooling that have been developed and platforms that Ultimate have in their Ultimate labs brand that we can actually utilise for some of our clients so that we can concentrate even more on that really five-star service that we provide and some of the maintenance pieces we can help get through that work around backups and patching and the rest of it. So, there’s some really interesting things there that I think we’ll be able to share in the coming months.
Danny Bluestone
Really exciting and obviously the world is becoming more and more digital than before and I’m not sure what your take his on the economy and where we’re heading but we get to hear a bit about that in a minute. But it seems like everybody’s moving gradually. Some businesses are moving faster than others, becoming fully digital and digital transformation. So, it’s really, really interesting times. And obviously, it’s really good fit for your business and our business, so what have you seen with kind of the different industries and verticals and I know that you’ve got some really interesting clients like Joe Wicks and consults a bit more about how kind of the transformation of digital is really happening.
Sam Booth
Yeah, obviously things have been going at lightning pace recently. And partly because it’s moved at, think like you say that the market is moving evermore to sort of digitalization everything else.
So that’s interesting parts of it and I also think the fact that everyone in the UK at the moment, certainly being stuck at home means that they’re not being able to travel or anything else means there’s a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of work and you can jump from meeting to meeting and so things seem to be going at electric pace.
So, yeah, like you say, that’s been really helpful for businesses like ours, I think it’s not a question of where the businesses need to move towards, having digital products and working a digitalized way both externally facing and internally, it’s just about how quickly they can do it. And so, the need for the skill sets, is going to be the biggest challenges going forward is just the amount of skill sets that are needed in digital, whether that be DevOps, whether that be development, whether that be user experience, whatever it is, those skill sets are now in massively high demand. So that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges from it.
And it’ll be interesting to see how it lasts into the future, I think is absolutely the case that in the next 5,10 years this is going to be the way things go and things are going to be more and more digital.
I think maybe in the shorter term later this year, it’ll be interesting to see how when people will maybe even next year, whenever people get released to go and use up their holiday and everything else, I think we might see the pace of the productivity that we’ve had over the last couple few months, might slow down slightly and probably for the better. But, yeah, so it’d be interesting to see how it plays out. But I think you’re right, like, it’s just a matter of time even those businesses that before would have said to you “oh, you know, digital, it’s just the channel for us is not that important, because most of our clients do X, Y, and Z, you know, and it’s all offline” even those ones now, would have been changed through because they wouldn’t be able to avoid it. So, it is an interesting time to be in this market, isn’t it?
Danny Bluestone
Yeah. chatting to a friend last night that is very senior in the city, in financial markets and he was saying there’s going to be like, almost consumption from consumers is pretty much been maintained at a steady pace. And that’s only going to accelerate after the pandemic, but more and more people are going to be doing things digitally than before.
So, things are just…, it’s going to be the biggest kind of boom, since the Vietnam War after the pandemic, that’s what he estimates. So, it’s really interesting stuff and obviously the world of web development has changed massively in the last 10 years, I remember pretty much around like 2011, people started to use like repositories and GitHub and prior to that like FTP, people just used to sort of take code and upload it to FTP.
Tell me a bit more about things like containerization and some of the exciting things that you guys do.
Sam Booth
Yeah, sometimes it’s funny because we’re working in the centre of the DevOps side of what we’re doing in the cloud engineering side and sometimes taking as written that everybody’s doing the same thing. But as you say, there’s still a whole lot of stuff which is out there and it’s on premier or oasin and isn’t had the app modernization as it’s referred to that piece done. But, it’s interesting to see how far things are coming especially for those businesses which can start with a clean slate.
Obviously, if you’ve got a legacy application, you have to take it slowly. You can come and you can modernise but obviously, the good thing for especially digital agencies, they’re always… quite often they will be starting something afresh, even if it’s something that the front ends use and you still got some legacy systems behind, you can start fresh, so you’re always learning and things are always moving. So even when I started the business everything was VMs basically and people were moving to cloud but acceleration over that five years to Cloud has been absolutely insane in times of the pace and without obviously we’re seeing what are the more modern ways to build things that it’s getting away from putting things on ten or on VMs and into platform services and functions and everything else. So, you mentioned earlier, we’ve got the clients that can start from a clean slate like the body coach one you mentioned which is through one of our partners, they built that whole thing completely using functions. So, it’s a really modern architecture, it’s actually very nice to support from our perspective as well, because everything’s broken down into those concision elements and microservices and everything else. So, you can really see what you’re looking at.
And then you’ve got the other side, which is a more monolithic stuff which is still around, there’s a lot of the bigger players in the customer experience space, trying to move away from it but still really in that world and then you’ve got that middle ground, which is the containerization and the platform services. So, from those there’s your past services but you’ve also got the whole Kubernetes piece and the containerization, it’d be interesting for me to see where that goes. Obviously, at modernisation, you move through those processes in the ideal world is to get to that kind of serverless architecture where everything’s just running on functions, it’s not going to be possible for everyone. But it will be interesting for me to see how sticky some of the container services are and how much that just goes by the wayside when people get into the more, entirely service kind of world. But I’m sure we’ll see new things that we can’t even see from sitting here now. And then a couple of years time we’ll be talking about something else such as the move of the technology. And that’s the challenge for all organisations and then for businesses like ours is to make…is to see trying to keep up with the technology but try not to jump on the whatever the latest fad is as well, so trying to make sure we’re actually guiding people in the right direction.
So yeah, there’s a whole bunch of stuff but the main thing for us, I think I said this to you before when we spoke is… and I think the key to why our business has been successful is that there is a blurring of the lines between what is the application and what is the infrastructure? Especially when you’re getting into that kind of functions piece is, they’re quite intrinsically linked together, you can’t say, well, this is a box, we look after the box and you put whatever you like on the box and that’s that, going back to the finger pointing thing.
You have to say well actually, this is the environment, this is the platform and the… it’s kind of the infrastructure and the application, there are all kind of one thing and so to be able to support it and do what we do, you really have to understand both worlds. And I think I’ve sort of been saying, since we started the business that you have to have people that understand app and cloud, you can’t just have infrastructure engineers now and then here’s your app Devs and they sit in two different worlds, they each have to understand each other and you have to use multiple skill sets to develop a team to be able to service people. And that’s the whole point of DevOps in the first place.
It’s the blurring and the blending of those two things and the processes that go around it. So, it’s an interesting time and I think we’re seeing it more and more and more. And I think that’s… from our perspective, it’s a good position to be in because we’ve tried to make sure that we understand both those worlds from the start the engineering and the infrastructure.
Danny Bluestone
It’s fascinating and that’s a good leader to our next section where we talk about, people, basically because even with all of these great technologies from like microservices to monolithic kind of architectures, you need people behind the scenes that really understands what’s going on. And particularly in your business, like our business, you’ll have different clients with different types of architectures and infrastructure and even functions and Code. So, it’s quite complex.
So, tell me a bit more about your philosophy around hiring, building teams, what sort of people you look for, potentially like what sort of roles you have in your company as well?
Sam Booth
Yeah.
Interviewer
…Yeah. And at the end, if you’re hiring because it’s always good to know if you are hiring, we get to hear that as well?
Sam Booth
Yeah, absolutely. The answer to that one is yes, absolutely. And we’re going quite aggressively and we’re looking for people in all our offices really and the same kind of roles.
Then the naming thing is an interesting one because I don’t think there’s so many… we’ve tended to use a kind of broad terminology around DevOps engineering and there’s obviously people that use Site Reliability Engineering, which lends itself to our 24/7 support piece and everything else. But really, it’s about background for me in terms of… I see a lot of people just go out to find a DevOps engineer, but really you need to know a lot more about what you’re actually looking for underneath that to be able to get the right type of person so we happen to look for quite often application engineers that are dotnet, PHP and other language where they’re experienced but they really are interested and have a good knowledge of one or more cloud platforms that they’ve been working in, so they’ve got their hands a bit dirty on the DevOps side or the cloud engineering side as well as doing their job.
Those people that have just very pigeon holed into IT development that somebody else deals with that kind of thing I’m not interested in looking at maybe not for us, we really look for those engineers that have a real interest in the cloud space as well because I find that everything’s more software defined and so, everyone’s doing everything infrastructure as code. So, from our perspective, I’ll probably get arguments for this, some quarters but I believe that application developers have a really good starting point to build great DevOps teams from not necessarily coming from an IT or server-based kind of background.
I actually think there’s a real big difference there, especially when you want people that are really hands on because they know how to get their hands dirty with these things and actually can understand the software defined approach because they are software developers themselves.
So that’s where we look but that’s very specific to our business, I guess. Those that focus much more on professional services may want to be looking more on the consulting side and again, they may come from a different background when you’re looking at a pure consultant that might not actually get on the tools that often, so it really depends on the business and what you’re looking for but for us, we’ve had great success with we’ve hiring developers to those positions and then cross learning across the team. So, we’ll have a cloud engineering background working with somebody that has a dotnet development background and within that, if we use the two of those people on one problem on project, whatever it might be then I think we get the best of both worlds because we get to two different types of backgrounds and I think that’s where the best DevOps engineering comes from, is when you have a combination of skill sets.
So yeah, that’s our big thing in terms of where we look and a lot of people ask me because we’re global, why do you use Singapore, Australia, and London? Not London, sorry, the UK. And I should say that it has allowed us to hire from a lot more than 10 places during the pandemic we’re not really worried about as most people are not really worried about where people are based now, it doesn’t matter to us. But what I’ve always avoided, and I think we’ve always avoided as a business is to intentionally going to what would be traditionally known as a low-cost centre to provide some of the services, so I get that question a lot. And to me, being that we’ve grown the business quite rapidly, it’s just been handy to have people that are closer to me that in markets that I understand, I lived in Singapore, got Chris who runs Australian office, so these are people that really understand the markets and the environment and how you employ in those places to go off to a separate place which I’ve never been or it’s quite a difficult thing to do.
Sam Booth
And I also believe that in the support space, people often quite think support developers are not what… it’s not an attractive proposition. But I actually sort of turn it on its head, actually, we’ve got some of those talented people in our team because they’re actually going in and sorting out problems that other people can’t solve and that’s real skill, the problem solving thing for us is absolutely critical than the people that are in organisations at the moment, they’re the go to person when there’s a problem. They’re the kind of people that we look for. So, when I’m talking to people about it, we are looking for the absolute top engineers because they need to be able to go in and talk to other engineers about difficult problems and be able to help out with them. So, it’s an interesting space and as I said earlier, hiring is going to be the absolute key part for any business in digital and any business generally, is hiring digital skills and cloud skills but as we all know, they are sparse and so you’ve got to be training. I think that’s the key, you’ve got to be bringing in young talent and training them up because we can’t just expect there to be a never ending stream of really talented experienced cloud engineers. So, we’ve taken on people that are just learning the ropes, got passion for it and some learning in their own time and want to get into the space and so we want to do more and more of that as we grow.
Danny Bluestone
That’s fantastic. Are there any… it sounds like it’s phenomenal in terms of your culture and your hiring strategy? Are there any kind of regrets or lessons that you’ve learned that you wish that you would have known before?
Sam Booth
No more than anyone else, as growing your business you take right and wrong turns with things and strategies that you go down I think sometimes we’ve… like I said, I kind of alluded to it there. But sometimes we’ve gone out to find the most experienced the best DevOps engineer, if I can use that term that we could find that’s got all the right ticks, tick boxes and got a CV full of all the right tooling and all the rest of it. And actually, I find being a bit more targeted on one particular skills that you’re looking for or one particular element you’re looking for or just finding someone that’s… like I said, wants learn it, will freely admit they don’t have quite the commercial experience but they’ve been doing a lot of this but in their spare time, they’ve been looking at AWS engineering or whatever, then those people can be just as valuable to the organisation. So, I think just trying to find some heavy hitter all the time I see it a lot when I look at other ads and things, I think actually, there’s better ways of doing things and it’s good to give people opportunity. So that’s the philosophy we’re trying to take.
Danny Bluestone
Great stuff. And what about… because obviously, in the technology industry throughout, there’s no real exceptions, really. Obviously, diversity is obviously a challenge getting
Sam Booth
Yeah
Danny Bluestone
…from obviously, hiring more women to black and other ethnic minorities getting more diversity. How can we as business leaders promote and make that diversity happen?
Sam Booth
Yeah, it’s a difficult one in this industry as well, there’s always been a challenge. Especially with bringing in women to this world, is kind of almost the bigger challenge in technology sometimes and it’s a very difficult thing to do. We try our hardest to try and make sure that we’re hiring on merit but we’re also hiring a diverse team but it’s a constant battle, I think it’s really goes back to the same before we have to look at it before just… who can we go and hire? It needs to be who can we bring on and the talent? So, when we’re talking about bringing on younger talent and bringing them through and helping them to learn the business and the technology side of things, I think we have to look make sure that we’re doing that within the most diverse pool that we can and not just again taking the same old people into the technology space. So that is a big change. But I think it’s incumbent on everybody to look at how we can bring more talent in at the entry level and then bring those skill sets up rather than just trying to cut how we going to go out and see who’s in the market. That’s not going to solve the problem, so I think it has to be about training and development and everything else. And it’s something that we can all do, even if it’s in a small way even if you have one person that’s a kind of an apprentice level, not necessarily. But it’s a sort of junior role, it only takes one or two people that you can bring in and making sure that that they’re from a diverse background as possible, that if we all do that in every agency and every business like ourselves, then I think we’ll start the chain of events that can mean in the future. We can look back and go actually now it’s much more diverse than it was.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, brilliant.
Thanks so much, Sam. I think it’s been so fascinating. I’ve personally learned so much just by having this conversation with you. So, I hope the audience as enjoyed it as much as I have. And I know your hiring as well is set in terms of like the different locations, is it? Can people be anywhere in the world or?
Sam Booth
Yeah, to be honest, I have to admit, like I was one of these people that start where I used to be like quite keen to have people in the office. I don’t really know why looking back but I think that was quite a lot of people but now we’re very flexible. We’ve taken a lot of people from all over the country, certainly in the UK, in the last… we have three different locations in Australia alone so we’ve got people in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney we also some people in New Zealand so we have people all over so yeah, it’s really like I say skill sets above location and just a winner and attitude in terms of the team just being part of the team. It’s all about a team game. Especially what we do and trying to work across borders, but in as one team as opposed to having you work in that office, we work in this office, we all work together. So that is not that someone comes with that kind of mentality of I’m a team player, problem solver, then for us yeah, they’re the people that we want to have in the business. So absolutely hiring sort of all over the world at the moment, including the states, which is going to be our next interesting challenge, I guess.
Danny Bluestone
Brilliant. So obviously we’ll keep in touch. I’d love to hear more about the states and what happens and thanks again Sam.
Sam Booth
Thank you very much.
Danny Bluestone
Thanks for listening. If you’re interested in hearing more about JAM, you can find them on Twitter @jam_24_27 or on LinkedIn by searching for Just After Midnight and of course on their own website justaftermidnight24/7.com You can find us Cyber-Duck on all major social media channel including Twitter @cyberduck_uk and Instagram @cyberduckuk and of course our own website which is cyber-duck.co.uk. Tune in for next time.
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