Business History

Infotheek
After my first year at university I took a summer job at Infotheek, a young computer company. I started with a large maintenance job on a BASIC program. At the end of summer I continued with the programming work and also started giving regular computer training in subjects like wordprocessing and spreadsheets.

Shell
Infotheek sent me out to being seconded at Shell head office in The Hague. Here I worked on the PC Help Desk for 3 years. After a slow start a new manager took the PC Help Desk to the point where it was probably the best PC Help Desk in the country

HelpDesk Ltd
One of my colleagues at Shell started a new company in the UK, specialising in providing help desk services. I joined him as the head of software development. Unfortunately the company was ahead of its time and didn't have enough staying power to wait for the market to catch up

Fraser Williams
Fraser Williams is (or was at the time) probably the largest UK-owned software company. I worked for them for 5 years, as a software engineer, systems analyst and team leader

Life Coach - Compass Mentis
However, I soon realised that I had done enough computing. Computing has always come so natural to me that it no longer felt challenging enough. So I soon started looking at alternatives and spent years trying to figure what I wanted to do next. This lead me into NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and then Coaching

Since April 1998 I have been a self-employed Life Coach, trading as Compass Mentis