About

What I do and why

I spent years building and running systems for small businesses, and the same thing kept happening. A company would be doing perfectly well, growing, profitable — and the people running it would be spending half their week on work that no longer needed a human at all.

Not because they were behind. Because nobody had ever had a spare fortnight to sit down and fix it.

So that’s the job. I come in, work out what’s genuinely repetitive, build something that handles it, write down what only exists in somebody’s head, and then get out of the way.

I work mostly with importers, distributors and wholesalers — businesses that buy from overseas, hold stock, and sell to trade. The problems in those companies rhyme, which means I’m not learning your business from scratch.

How I work

Foundations before anything clever. Backups, email, filing. Boring, and everything else is worthless without it.

Nothing that works gets replaced. If your warehouse system does its job, it stays. I’d rather build around something that works than rebuild it and introduce new problems.

Nothing sends on its own. Every customer-facing message waits for a person. That’s not a preference, it’s how I build.

Everything in your name. Your accounts, your data, your documentation, from day one. If you decide you’d rather not work with me, you keep a working system and the cost goes down.

I’ll tell you when something isn’t worth doing. Including when it’s my own idea. That’s most of what you’re paying for.

A declared interest

I also built Contextium, a platform for organising the knowledge that AI tools need in order to give useful answers. It’s one of the tools I’d likely use in your business, and you should know that up front rather than work it out later.

To be clear about what that means: you’d buy it in your own company’s name, at the same published price anyone pays. I take no commission and add no markup. You can decline it, or replace it later, and the rest of the work doesn’t depend on it.

The upside for you is that when the tooling needs to do something specific to your business, I can make it do that.

Based in Reading

I work with businesses across the Thames Valley and the South East, and remotely elsewhere. For the audit and the early setup I’d want to be on site with you — some of this only becomes obvious standing in the warehouse.

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Silentshift is a trading name of Thomas Jutla. Professional indemnity insurance in place.