In late 2016 Another local startup venture Story Starter asked Wayne to develop a software and delivery platform linked to a marketing campaign.

So what is Story Starter… Well even the founders found it hard to explain and without breaking NDA’s etc.

Here is a stab…

Story Starter as a venture hold a series of web properties (websites in other words) to enable “viral” story creation and build by the “crowd”

A member can start a story which then grows much as open source software delivery can grow

This venture is presently seeking seed funding for launch.

After Mountain software, Wayne helped a number of local business ranging from fashion to delivery to transportation and plastics manufacturing.

In 2009, after breaking from his marriage, moved on and traveled in China, Australia, Russia, Cyprus, Canary Islands, Thailand,  Cambodia, Vietnam, and the US. Wayne coached a couple of clients on Tenerife. Most notably Rob Ng the owner of a growing chain of high-end restaurants.

His time with Rob was spent engineering the acquisition of new properties, reworking menus, and client care solutions across the group. It was not until 2015 was Wayne, drawn back to help with a couple of startup ventures, returned to the software development scene in a hands-on sense. These were relatively small projects or only a few man years work each.

Wayne set out to be the lead architect and developer (at code level) on both projects.

He saw this as a challenge… to return to the “code” face as it were after so long and get back in the saddle

During the time Wayne could not let go of his ambition to fly and to constantly progress…

He qualified as a helicopter pilot in 2007 and made use of the fixed wing pilot license much as the parents of the owner of the hardwood supply company had explained his had some years earlier.

Wayne was able to be in the Midlands, in London and in Newcastle all on the same day to make things happen face to face. He also enjoyed the flying. By this point, Wayne had also purchased a Cessna aircraft as the RANS S10 could not, under air law, fly in cloud or at night…

Both of these would prevent Wayne from traveling when he needed to and the Cessna filled that gap.

Wayne tells us it was not as much fun as the RAN S10 though.

After the project at ISA Wayne assisted C-Scape a small consultancy in London in its bids for “Help the Aged” and “Kingston Borough Council”

During the bidding process, Wayne completed his Prince II practitioner training and qualifications which helped with the bid process and in his structuring of the development process to be followed for these and other project undertaken by C-Scape. C-Scape (not withstanding the initial lack of business and development controls and process) was a stable business and Wayne was able to move on quite quickly.

Then followed a mega period of head hunting and merger and acquisition activity leaving Wayne drained and ready for a rest in 2009 …

Wayne was deeply involved in the structuring of the business and service delivery aspects of Cassium, Freedom 2000, ISA, Mountain Software, First Consulting Group and involved in the deployment of major technology projects for British Telecom, Barclays Bank, Abbey National, Virgin, Microsoft, and others.

So next came the thirst of academic study and the sense of achievement this can bring.

Wayne set out initially to become a commercial pilot and ultimately achieved an ATPL (well a frozen ATPL as he never flew commercially and so never attained the level of commercial flying hours to unlock the license for Airline work). Wayne never wanted to fly for an airline but wanted the achievement in life and on the passing of the Instrument rating in a twin-engine Cougar out of Leeds airport under the guidance of Multi Flight Wayne achieved that goal.

It was during this time when Wayne first met one of the original investors into Netstore… Something else which would also come around in a few years time. Tony Denson who was also very much into aviation and was the owner of Waynes training aircraft which amazingly had a “great” registration “GR-EAT” 🙂 actually completed one of the key events with Netstore on the day he took his IR flight test. Wayne recalls Tony explaining after the test the pressure Tony had been under was completely unrelated to the flight test… Netstore had been floated on the stock exchange at that very moment…

This relationship Wayne built with Tony would come back a couple of times on a small scale and then later with the Cassium acquisition.

Whilst doing flight training at Leeds Bradford Wayne couldn’t help but advise and assist as the owner of the then oldest flying schools in the UK “The Yorkshire Flying School” as she sold it to Multiflight. Waynes experience in business change and financial management was of immense help. The challenges in that sale/acquisition were no different to the many challenges that Wayne had worked through and would be no different in real terms from those Pilot Training and Testing Limited would have encountered with its more recent acquisition of Multiflight in 2016.

Wayne was in good shape to refocus and make headway in his carrier.  

Wayne did a fair bit of traveling for work and pleasure at this time and met up with a chap (who’s name is not available for print but lets call him John). John was a registered stunt man and actually, Wayne assisted him on his scuba diving training to allow him to progress in that career, which it is understood he has done to a great height.

Wayne learned from John, specifically that you can do a great many things in life and do them well. John was a scuba diver (to a high standard), a horse rider to a high standard, a commercial pilot etc etc. The conversations with John lead Wayne to recall conversations with Buzz and the team at Kennedy Space Centre and recalls saying the his wife I wonder if I can get a pilots license to fly us to France next month.

It turns out he could get the licence but Wayne did not fly to France that month (although he has several times since done just that). Wayne approached a flying school in Welshpool UK about an intensive training course form start to finish in 3 weeks. The CFI at Welshpool took up the challenge and within days Wayne was in the pilots seat and within 3 weeks had qualified as a private pilot.

Once Wayne achieve the licence he looked locally at options for recreational flying. Most of the local clubs were all to “clicky” for Wayne. He just wanted to fly and didn’t want to get into part plane ownership or restricted usage of school owned planes that had all seen better days.

Enter the PFA and GB-TJX.    

Once things had started to settle after the birth of the girls Wayne worked part-time and contracting to various international firms who found themselves in trouble with IT, Software or business change.

Wayne aligned himself with Systems Management (a management consultancy firm), Stephen Page & Co (a firm of solicitors) and Knights and Co (A registered insolvency practitioner).

Between these 3 Wayne was kept as busy as he wanted to be and he was able to enjoy some of the things other people do whilst at University (when he was working in the spare time) and explore some partying and hobbies but Wayne style. (excess is the norm)

Wayne qualified as a scuba diver just days before a trip to Disney World Orlando (another event to be noted)

On this trip, he was accompanied by his mother, brother, wife and 4 daughters… During the stay the family made the almost mandatory (for none locals) visit to to Kennedy Space Center. Whilst on that visit Wayne met Buzz Aldrin and a number of other key NASA people. Wayne got the bug for learning to fly… not into space but the freedom of flight and its relationship to the freedom of scuba.

Later that week Wayne and Anita visited the Space Centre again as they were invited to the launch of the Space Shuttle. Sitting some miles away the sight of the Shuttle launch was still something very special and marked the event in Waynes mind and would trigger again in a year or so.  

At the completion of the contract with NCB, the Managing Director of CARB’s, the company creating Eagle, approach Wayne about an opportunity to work on another aspect of EAGLE.

CARBS had teamed up with The Building Design Partnership (a very large building design firm in Europe) and they needed someone to spearhead a series of developments in CAD and in particular 3D CAD. Wayne initially rejected the approach as he had by this time been accepted at Manchester to study for his BSc. He was convinced to attend a meeting that would once again change the direction of his life. 6 days after the meeting Wayne packed up home and left for sunny Preston on the west coast of the UK.

BDP had agreed to fully fund his degree at Manchester and all accommodation costs plus pay a salary. He agreed to join BDP for 1 year after which he would review the situation. At the end of the first year, Wayne elected to terminate with BDP and join CARBS and work directly on EAGLE software development.

Wayne was given several from the minicomputer based development tasks (Fortran, assembler, and UNIX) and a major task of migrating EAGLEto the PC (DOS). The next year or so was focused on assembly language programming and pre-processing the EAGLE code (Fortran and C) to compile efficiently on the PC’s of the day (running DOS – no windows back then.. oh and also 640K of memory… he used paged memory to extend this to a “massive” 2 Mb).

The projects forged and so did Wayne…

Wayne progressed through various low-level Degrees in IT in various forms alongside his work. A key event here was the introduction to a local firm Cast Iron Services (a business supplying under-ground large bore cast iron pipework that had just incurred a significant loss from a failed IT rollout) CIS reached out the local Technical College for help and they in term asked Wayne to go along and advise.

Wayne was quickly engaged (well at the end of the 1st meeting) by Micheal Daws the then MD of the firm. The direction is given… “fix this and save my company” Wayne went to work reviewing first the failed IT solution… Nothing wrong there, then the implementation, actually nothing wrong there. So where are the failure and the rising costs?

Look further..Wayne uncovers no reduction in manpower in stock control, invoicing, salary processing… These aspects were huge to the firm in terms of overheads and with the high finance rates of the day linked to the high rate of borrowing on the IT solution the business was on a problematic path, to say the least. Wayne took up the role of financial controller reporting directly to the board and international shareholders (all in his mid to late teens). Decisions were made about staff cuts and process changes across the business, a second cheaper storage facility was leased (all facilitated by the new IT centered business)

The business saved; Wayne was released and he progressed to more underground work 🙂 (See next section)

Secondary education at Paulette Comprehensive in Burton on Trent (UK) Achieved little in the way of normal qualifications but excelled at computers to the dizzy height of teaching local Teacher Training College and Local Technical College pre 16 years of age. Wayne spent some time at Lloyds bank working with IT (whilst still at school … things were quite different then)

By the end of his secondary education, Wayne had a few ‘O’ Levels and an ‘A’ in Computer Science. What he lacked in qualifications he more than made up for with the huge amount of IT and Business knowledge, experience and skills attained.

Wayne enter the world…