This is a hopefully more ordered, more complete explanation of my rambling thread on fedi on the 1st, so that I can more easily share this “development” and my reasoning with people in different forums without writing all this wall of text into some slack group or mailing list or other, because while it already feels self-indulgent as it is to blog about this, if I don’t communicate this in some way I’m hardly going to get the outcome I want and some of you might get vexed at not being able to reach me directly any more seemingly unexpectedly without understanding why.

Given how high the stakes can be when people are trying to urgently get in touch with me, I also don’t want any of this to be a surprise, so I feel obliged to explain what’s changing and why.

TL;DR Version:

If you emailed me at my Netcalibre / LCHost addresses before 19/12/2025 and haven’t had a reply you aren’t getting one, sorry.

My direct email is not the fastest or best way to get help. If it’s work related, please email a role address instead – i.e. sales, support (there’s a list of the more common ones below). Please, do not CC me on emails to role addresses. If I need to see it, the ticketer will tell me about it.

If you have a mobile number ending 80 for me, delete it – that number is no longer current, just forwards to the IVR, and I do not have, nor plan to get, a replacement “work mobile”.

If it’s urgent or out of hours, email the details to the right role address and then use the main company number 020 3026 2626 to get help – it’s a very short menu, I promise.

The Full Version:

I Am but One Flawed Human

I wouldn’t describe myself as a control freak (certainly I’ve never been tyrannical or obsessive about having control ‘in of itself’), but I certainly obsess about things being done correctly in a way that has previously made it harder for me to trust other people to get things done. One of my co-directors has previously – and probably somewhat charitably – described that I “allow perfect to be the enemy of good” which I will accept is as succinct an explanation I can imagine of how my character flaws present.

The last two years have seen me add, for the first time, new director-shareholders, and with us now having an actual technical team.. well, to say that these changes have required some personal growth in being able to trust and delegate is quite the understatement. It has not been a trivial or easy task. I have not always been easy for my fellow directors to work with. I am lucky that they can see through that to the value in us working together.

The evidence to date, then, has proven that while the results weren’t always immediately perfect, ceding control and delegating more has not, in fact, resulted in the world ending and has unarguably paid significant dividends for the business which shows no signs of slowing down, so now, really, as we approach the 25th anniversary of me starting a Linux shell hosting company in my spare time at university, I suppose I have no serious alternative but to continue leaning into this change.

Scaling into the Future

At the heart of all of this is the perhaps obvious-when-you-write-it-down principle that I, personally, do not scale.

This is not exactly news to anyone, myself included, nor is it the sort of earth shattering incredible business management insight upon which someone can build a career in book tours and business seminars, but it is perhaps something I had not felt able to – or perhaps prepared – to accept, at least in a.. practical sense.

Swerving any serious introspection about this particular elephant in the room in the past generally involved quipping that I needed to be able to clone myself (something which I think we can probably all agree would more likely than not be a terrible development for everyone).

To continue growing like we are, we will have to build a team around our directors who can – to begin with – operate as an extension of ourselves, but in the end ultimately replace us in several areas of the business so that we can focus entirely on complex contracts, projects and actual Direction – and be able to take a holiday without feeling compelled to open a laptop every single day (this will be a very hard habit for me to break). Now then, I instead quip about working to put myself out of a job.

So: I am starting this year by being realistic about the state of my mailbox as 2025 came to a close, reflecting on how it got into that state, thinking about the current and likely future demands on my time, and ultimately communicating the changes in how I work to ensure everyone gets the best possible experience out of their dealings with Netcalibre going forward as the business continues to grow.

I recognise that part of the reason I had any customers at all before the arrival of people here who understood Sales and Marketing is because people were mad enough to want to work specifically with me. These relationships are something I value and the burden is going to be on us – me – to ensure that you don’t feel short-changed in all of this.

One of my key objectives is that you should, if anything, only notice an improvement in service by not contacting me directly – even if I ultimately end up being heavily involved in your work, there will be a team of people around me to herd cats, organise meetings, take minutes, prepare quotations, send invoices (not always a given just a few short years ago!) and just generally manage everything in a way that will ensure that things happen when they should.

You know, almost like a real business.

You Should Probably Stop Emailing Me..

If you emailed me before 19/12/2025 and haven’t had a reply you aren’t getting one, sorry.

To actually make a change meant doing something with the backlog of messages I was never going to get to, and yesterday I tossed everything pre 19/12/2025 into an archive folder “as is” (with 10,768 unreads, now that Outlook has actually counted all of them).

I’ve now cleared out any remaining “holiday period” stuff (i.e. post 19/12/2025) – taking me to the vaunted “Inbox Zero” for perhaps the first time ever – and will try to be stricter from now on in forwarding any suitable work related stuff into the ticketer rather than replying directly.

This means – more than ever before – that my direct email will not be the fastest way to get help, as I will just forward general business/service/product questions/requests into the ticketer for the team to collect – even if I know your request will need my involvement or input.

So if it’s a general work related request, please – please – email (only!) a role address instead so that the team can help you – i.e:
accounts (you have questions relating to being billed for a thing)
access (you need to get in somewhere we control in order to do a thing),
hands (you want us to go somewhere and do a thing),
sales (you want a quote for, or to buy, a thing),
support (you need help with some other thing not covered above),
(all at netcalibre dot uk)
Please, do not CC me on emails to role addresses. If I need to see it, the ticketer will tell me about it, and me being added to the CC just tends to mean I get two copies of every email for cases I am actively involved in.

In the unlikely event that you feel the need to escalate, ask for it in the ticket and it will happen. There is no KPI for “making the least escalations”, so nobody is in any way incentivised to try and prevent it.

If that doesn’t work for your case for some reason, then mail or call your account manager (this might be news to you: we have people who fill that role now!).

If that doesn’t work, or you don’t have an account manager, then email me, or call in and ask to speak with me.. which does however bring me onto..

..and You Will Probably Have to Stop Calling Me

Where e-mailing me directly is certainly bad for your request, 500+ people (a sheer guess based on the size of my own phonebook) having my mobile number and being able to call me whenever is bad for everyone’s requests.

Putting aside the fact that I am not always going to be the person on call on a given night, my work focus is too easily derailed, and for long periods of time at that, by people being able to call me directly, and so it’s had to stop. Sorry. I do honestly wish I wasn’t this person, but at this point I don’t see this changing.

If you still have a mobile number ending 80 for me in your phonebook, delete it. It’s no longer current and isn’t coming back, and just forwards to our main office number since a couple months ago. I very rarely might read messages that are sent to it, like, once a month, as I gradually ‘exit’ from using that number and unpick it from my life after using it for probably 20 years.

In short, I do not have a ‘work mobile’ and will likely not have one again.

If it’s work related (or an out of ours emergency), please call the main number 020 3026 2626 – our IVR is very short day or night and you’ll be guided to the right help in one step.

How This Helps My Team

Our team is already very good but the only way they get better is by maximising their training opportunities which means everything has to go through them so that they get every possible chance to learn something new – either shadowing as we handle your case, or in my weekly teaching sessions where we work through the team’s list of topics they want to learn more about.

These sessions are open to everyone in the business, not just people with engineer in their job title, because I am a big believer in trying to ensure everyone in the business understands as much as possible about the products and services they are working with. Levelling up everyone’s expertise makes it much more likely that errors and omissions can be avoided or at least detected by anyone, and allows everyone to transact with our customers more confidently.

How This Helps You

Our support team in particular has a 30 minute target SLA during working ours for “triage-by-human” as a minimum for all tickets, an SLA they have hit 99.35% of the time for the last 90 days at time of writing this post.

I think it’s fair to say that this in itself is a point of some pride for our team and I guarantee that this is much quicker than the average response time for an email sent to me.

I am hopeful this stops you being dissuaded from bringing stuff to us because of being worried about “bothering me”, which I have heard a few times from people towards the end of 2025. I don’t want to inadvertently be driving business away if people think the only way to transact with us would be to actually have to “bother me”, because it’s not been the case for the last two years.

We have built a great team of people who clearly enjoy their work and who genuinely want to help and – frankly – are always going to be better as a team than me individually at answering emails. I implore you to send your emails to them, or to call them.

What Isn’t Changing

Some of you have specifically contracted me through Netcalibre to fulfil a role inside your business. That does not change, and particularly anything “private and confidential” should still flow through my direct mailbox.

Anything complicated or high-stakes will still have my involvement, at the very least in the background.

I’m not going to become a Director of PowerPoint and people will still have to pry my terminal client out of my cold, dead hands.

The team can (almost always) reach me if they need my help.

My commitment to “do it right or make it right” has – and is – of course, the shared commitment of our entire team.

If you know me personally and need my number for social reasons, then private mention me on fedi or drop me an email, of course.

Don’t Suffer in Silence

If you’re worried or not sure about something, or in the unlikely event that something doesn’t seem to be going right, you can always ask whoever’s dealing with your case to double-check with me so that we can put those concerns to rest. Nobody will be offended.

If anything at all is worse from these changes, then please let me know, and we will fix it.