Ben Bodien

Ben Bodien arrived in the web industry via a fuel depot explosion and an economic crisis. He’s co-founder & principal of Neutron Creations, a development agency based in London, that are quickly making a name for themselves, collaborating with well know designers such as Elliot Jay Stocks and Tim Van Damme. In this weeks episode, Ben takes me through he career to date and his experiences of starting his own business.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Ben: My job title erhmmm , Ok my job title is co-founder and principal which is quite a mouthful it is one of those job titles where everyone sort of loves to hate. It is not something that is short and snappy that is very descriptive
the reason was when Mark and I set the company up we wanted to have a title that sort of described that we owned the company but it wasn’t a dusty corporate title like director or CEO because we are both equal partners in the business so we can’t both be CEO’s
So yeah we had quite a long discussion about it and we sort of borrowed from the advertising/creative industries where they have principals or partners so we went with that and we stuck co-founder on the front to make it a bit longer and also to imply we are the ones running this place.

Ryan: And we are talking about Neutron Creations?

Ben: That’s right yes, it is a web development agency very small agency more like a studio there are two of us in it at the moment the two co-founders, and yeah we may be looking to expand this year we are only a year old now so errhm we are now at the stage where things are running stably and happy with where it is going it might be time to grow but we do not want to run too fast I don’t think.

Ryan: So what do you do day to day for the business ?

Ben: Day to Day, there is no such thing as a sort of typical day really it depends what type of projects we have on, there is a lot of running the business. We sort of share that so we haven’t lumped either one of us with your doing all the finance, your doing all the marketing so there is a lot of admin answering emails we both look after accounting that sort of stuff all the day to day operational things for a business. My actual stuff, stuff that I actually do is front-end development that’s my reason to be I suppose typically it is, for the last few projects we do all sorts of different stuff, we do not have a typical project either so we have been asked to jump in on existing websites and add some extra stuff, we have also done projects were we have taken a design and we do all the front-end coding and also we we take designs and do front-end and back-end. So we do all sorts of things really. So depending on how much front end coding there is involved in the project dictates what I am doing on that particular day with that particular project. So if there is none then I will be doing other stuff, or working on another project. Mostly it is taking designs and implementing them in HTML and CSS, jQuery and making them work and sing that is really what I do.

Ryan: Lots and lots of variety then so that is always good

Ben: Yes, although recently over the xmas period it seems to be mostly email is what I have been doing. So I have had a month of emailing and now it might be back to work, actual work.

Ryan: OK, so as you say you have been running your own business for about a year

Ben: That’s right yes.

Ryan: Just rewind a little then and take me back to the beginning how did your career start out?

Ben: The beginning OK , [Laughs]

Ryan: Start from the beginning

Ben: Yes, OK I guess it is all in the title. It is quite funny actually I was thinking about this when we agreed to do this I haven’t really had any jobs that haven’t been directly relevant to what I have ended up doing, which quite handy I suppose I have never done any bar tending or anything like that maybe I will come back to you later as a retirement project or something. The first thing I did was like an internship for a company my aunt worked for actually and I was just lumped in with the IT department, like 5 people and I think it was a two month thing over a summer holiday and I was basically the IT busybody so I was checking cables restarting things and making tea was pretty much the extent of my duties. One thing I had to do was make an asset register of every single piece of IT hardware in the company premises which was like for a company of 500 people that takes a while.

Ryan: [laughs]

Ben: That was like a month long project that one, that was an unpaid work experience thing I think I was about 17 or so, 16 or 17 but i have been set on computery related things for decades now. So it has always been that sort of career path, I have never swung in from other avenues like being an accountant or microbiologist or anything.

Ryan: So where did you go from there I mean , were you did you do university or college.

Ben: I yes, I went to University, after that I did, I got into my head that I was going to be a video game designer or developer because I have been playing games since I could look at a computer basically so right from a BBC basic so gaming has always been there in a big way and I wanted to write games basically so I sort of set off down that path working out what I needed to do to reach that goal, I got internship, well it was not an internship it was a beta testing thing for two weeks with Loinhead studios.

Ryan: oh yeah

Ben: Who were the guys that made black and white and some other stuff as well Fable, Peter Molyneux’s company basically so I did two weeks there and that was fantastic It was like a games company brilliant this is what I want to be doing so talking to there coders they said the best way to get into games coding is to do a course in computer science as a degree rather than anything games specific as a degree as that does not give you a decent founding in the sort of theories of it so off I went I went to Kent University and studied computer science there. During which time I tried coding games and found it was actually quite hard so I drifted along for a bit not sure what or which way I was going with it. As part of the university program it was a sandwich year, or a year in industry and in that year I went to work for Sun Microsystems in California for one year so that was amazing, being paid, it wasn’t actually that much money but the accommodation was paid for flights there and back were paid for so it was kind of everything you were given it was errr disposable income so we bought lots of cameras and shiny things, explored San Francisco and the bay area that was all very good. So while I as there I was working with the streaming server team which was a software streaming server for video and they were developing one with this tiny team in Sun that no one even within the rest of Sun had heard of. So they were trying to get that started and get a voice within the company and get Sun actually using their own product. Part of that was helping to revamp the products internal intranet, sort of web page so they had this really ropey typical open-source web page which sort of said download this, download this download this there were like 50 download links on a web page it is how most open source things seem to work, and no one really knew what the thing was about so I worked with them to redesign the web page and introduce this new thing which was new to them and me at the time which was CSS moving from their tables based horrendous site they had before. So that was my first taste of front end development on the web I hadn’t really done much web stuff before it had all been in Dreamweaver or on the back end side of things with PHP and relaying on a CMS for front end so that was where I got my first taste for front end development so I thought OK this is the next to be looking at is coding interfaces and doing the front end of things.

Ryan: SO OK where did it go from there when was that, how long ago was that you were working for Sun ?

Ben: That was 2002,2003 that was a year long placement so they sent us back to the UK and we finished or degrees and what happened after that, well I graduated mysteriously by some string of luck then whjat happened, that time was all very lots of things happened all very quickly it was kind of a blur.

Ryan: [laughs]

Ben: Oh so that is right I did a diploma in audio engineering for a year which was another thing, I was always interested in making music as well so that was kind of me exploring if that was something I wanted to do professionally?

Ryan: OK

Ben: But as with games coding it turned out the industry is fiercely competitive and the salaries are not all that high so, it is not the easiest thing to go into and luckily I had the degree in CS sitiing behind that so that was a decent fallback. So then I worked for company called Trilogy logistics which is always a mouthful to say, I could never get the hang of that and they were a new division of a video games distribution company so it was computer science stuff not actually working on games but in and around games. It was basically working in a warehouse making sure video games got to shops from the pubishers and the manufacturing so there was a lot of more IT related stuff looking after a warehouse full of computers all the staff and operation stuff, replacing printer cartridges the usual exciting stuff but within that job I got involved in writing some of our own applications for the company and those were all web based apps. So it was my first taste of web apps. So they were like things for booking delivery slots for the drivers to come and collect packs of games, the warehouse only had a finite number of loading slots, I think it was one so we had a very tight schedule for when drivers would come to pick things up. They would get stuff loaded into the van it would take 20 mins or something and they would drive off and these guys are all working on a tight schedule so we needed something to organise all of this and is probably quite typical it was all done in a excel spreadsheet when I got there so I though you know there is a better way to do this something that more than one person can look at at a time, doesn’t loose information if someone edits the spreadsheet, you know it is done properly. So I set about building a webapp for that having learnt more about this transition everyone was making from desktop apps to web apps. This was in 2003 I suppose , 2004 when it was starting to happen. So yes that was a good run into web application building, as I was the only person their doing that, that particular side of the work I was doing front end and back end. There was no specialisation there it was just we need this get Ben to do it, so that’s pretty much how that worked.

Ryan: OK

Ben: And then the warehouse exploded. They had, I don’t know if you remember it was next to the Bunsfield Oil Depot in Hertfordshire .

Ryan: No but I can imagine where this is going

Ben: OK to set the scene it is basically this enormous facility which has petrol tanks, not just like tanks but massive storage containers for all the petrol stations in the southeast and Heathrow, and Stanstead and Luton and Gatwick so there is a lot of petrol there and one day some of it spilled out and someone started their truck and it all exploded and it basically levelled the warehouse we had so that was my first taste of how important backups are because ours were very rudimentary at the time. It did actually work out we had it all backed up but it was a bit scary when you turn on Sky news and your office is on fire and flat.

Ryan: I was going to say, so you was not there at the time I take it.

Ben: No that was pretty amazing actually it was the christmas period I think it was 2005 it happened around then it was kind of miraculous it was 6:00am on a Sunday morning. Had it been a few hours later there would have been some temp staff in there doing some packing or if it had been on a weekday then there would have been 50 people in there so no one hurt but the business was demolished and had to relocate so there was a long period of reshuffling moving servers and getting everything set up there. We moved to a new facility and carried on with that for a while. But you know there is only so long you can go on for changing printer cartridges in half of your time and then building webapps in the other half, when you really enjoy doing the webapps and the printer cartridges just start getting you down a bit you just start resenting them so

Ryan: [Laughs]

Ben: So I started to get a little bit bored there, so I think I lasted two years there with a massive explosion in the middle so that wasn’t too bad.

Ryan: So that’s what spurred on your interest to go down the web route.

Ben: Yes so then I was definitely set on doing web stuff I thought this was a fast moving industry and I’d heard about these people who specialise in doing certain aspects of web development are not just lumped with doing the whole thing so I thought if maybe I can find a different company I might be able to focus more on what I am interested in, not stuff that I can’t do or I am not confident I can do a brilliant job in. So for me that was moving away from backend development and towards the front end.

Ryan: OK So where did you end up after that

Ben: So after that one, well one random evening I met this guy in a bar who turned out to be the CTO of a hedge fund. We were both extremely drunk he was asking me what I did and I explained what I was doing and explained that I was working on some reporting stuff and guys in finances go crazy for reporting they can never get enough reports so I sort of lit up because I though reporting, oooh fancy stuff web stuff and he said why don’t you come in and talk to us and we will see if there is something you can help us with here. So I went in there and I sort of had a very rapid shotgun job interview in like 30 minutes where I sat down by the technical team and they asked me what i did and all that kind of stuff and asked me some finance questions which I completely flucked becuase I had nothing to do with finance before that. They said, they started me on a sort of probation period thing just to see how it goes so I did not know anything about finance that was a sticking point for both of us but it turned out quite well and I went on full time there and that one that was interesting, this was pre credit crunch and it was a hedge fund that was specialising in collatorised debt obligations which were the things that went pretty wrong and they were also specialising in American warrants and mortgage backed securities and all the stuff that you read about in the papers during the summer that year. So not only that the company was also doing it on behalf of an Icelandic Investment bank so ..

Ryan: ahhh

Ben: It was like this huge huse of cards, mountain of cards with a few of us perched on top. So that was fun and it unwound very quickly but while I was working on a webapp which again seems to be theme in my career was moving people away from excel to web applications so that was taking these dusty financial reports which were just a billion numbers crammed into a A4 page and no heirachy or anything it was just numbers numbers numbers and you just had to sit and look at it for ten minutes and have a degree in Economics to understand what any of it meant so I thought what … By this time I had been reading lots of books by Edward tufte aswell , the visualisation Informational designer

Ryan: Yes

Ben: So i thought I can apply loads of this stuff to this. So I started building this web application which would go through the same database that all these numbers were coming out off but get out the important ones for certain groups of people, so you had traders who made snap decisions so they did not want to be sat there with a spreadsheet that has a million numbers in it when they only need to see maybe five for a particular company they are looking at.
That was me trying to educate the finance industry or at least a tiny pocket of it, and it was going quite well but then it all collapsed extremely quickly when the credit crunch took hold. Since we were working on the reporting we had a pretty good idea of what was happening so we sort of had forewarning of what was coming since we were the ones doing the charts which had this lovely line going up and up and then suddenly bang this huge fall and at that company I had recruited Mark who is now my business partner who I had originally met at University I recruited him into the company as our sort of Systems Architect because he is a fantastic backend developer. So he was working with me there for, I think he was there for about nine months before the end, so maybe around that yeah and then it all started falling apart so they laid of a few staff, luckily we were seen as some of the key ones so we were kept on but increasingly there was not much to do in the office it was sort of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs while everyone else was running around putting out fires because the technical teams were, you know there was not much to do while the house was on fire. So we were there twiddling our thumbs wondering what to do facing the increasingly likelihood of redundancy so we started planning for that for quite a while and eventually we thought this has coming it was just around the corner so we may as well either we are going to have to go out looking for jobs, which neither of us particularly fancied or we can try and start up a company of our own doing much the same stuff as we are doing now just for something other than finance as that is going to be on hold for a while in healing mode. So while that company whilst it’s death throws we were quietly sitting in a corner setting up another company researching company names and this sort of stuff and planning our line of attack with our first clients. So that was how the company came about. We were given a few months notice period with redundancy by which time we had already had about two months preparation time on this company so we bootstrapped our company enabling us to have the first three months free of having to pay ourselves out of the business so that really gave us our jumpstart.

Ryan: Ok

Ben: And luckily it all worked and here I am still today.

Ryan: Cool, Fantastic, I suppose leading on from that, I suppose, you are the first person I have interviewed that’s a partnership. I have interviewed quite a few people who have freelanced or worked for an agency but there is just you and Mark …

Ben : Yes

Ryan: …as a partnership, what advice would you give to people who maybe looking to, maybe a bit afraid of going out on their own or don’t want to go for a bigger agency or want to get involved with working with someone else what advice would you give to them starting their own business?

Ben: Sure the partnership is really good I think it is has the best of both worlds it still feels like you are freelancing when there is only the two of you because, obviously initially you are not going to have an office I don’t this is my house [indicating behind him] so you don’t have that sort of slugging into work thing like when you are in a larger company but also with a partnership you have got someone else to lean on and bounce ideas of so there is a bit more stability and security then just you going stir crazy in a room by yourself. I think it has a lot of benefits from both sides, Mark had been freelancing before so he knew what that was about I had never freelanced myself before so it was all new to me. I had worked in sun for a year which was well at the time 40,000 people and I think day after I arrived they got rid of 10,000 so I was pretty sure I was not going to go back to that kind of scale of company since you know they can kill 10,000 people of with a wave of the hand and now they are owned by Oracle is it, I think they are owned by know is it I haven’t even kept up so yes it has all been a bit funny. So I think for partnerships as long as you find the right person to do it with, I would not recommend just grabbing someone of the streets and saying “hey be my partner this is what we are going to do” it has to be something you are both dead keen on that you both can bring complimentary skills sets to the table so you are not both doing the something arguing about how you would do something all the time and I think with Mark and I we already knew we worked really well together from our time in the financial sector short-lived though it was. So we were both confident we could work with each other I think that is the main thing. I think I read an article recently where someone was saying it is more important to prioritise the working atmosphere between partners in the company rather than the skills so if you go out and cherry pick people you would like to work with that you have never even met before just purely based on their skillets then you may probably end up being disappointed because you will find out they are complete idiots that you can’t spend more than five minutes with in one room.

Ryan: Yes true

Ben: So yes it is a good way to go as long as you can find the right person and as long as you havoc the necessary guts I suppose, because it is pretty scary as you know going freelance trying to do it the same but with two of you is a little bit more scary because then it is two people who are potentially being done over if it all falls apart so. Yes it is good we are aiming to turn it into a larger thing to grow a little more but as I say we are trying to keep it small and controllable for now.

Ryan: Ok so looking back at your career what would you say your greatest achievement has been?

Ben: Greatest achievement, I would definitely say career wise it is setting up this company because it has been the most enjoyable thing I have worked on in my entire career being able to choose what I work on being able to say no to people and them not just saying do it anyway. Yes it has been fantastic so I think definitely this company has been the best thing. Having said that if I had leapt straight out of University and tried to go into this I think it would have fallen flat on it’s face quite quickly so I think you do need a bit of experience under your belt working for other people before you leap straight out there

Ryan: Ok

Ben: Although I know people who have done that so it is not impossible but yes

Ryan: So on the flip side fog that have you any regrets?

Ben: Regrets ooh the difficult questions are coming now

Ryan: [Laughs]

Ben: Lets see I suppose let me think this is well OK I suppose the difficult thing would be what would I have done differently in hindsight I probably wouldn’t have flapped about with the career direction as much although I think I have been fairly focused but I probably would have abandoned games earlier if I had tried doing it earlier rather than just thinking about doing it. The diploma in audio engineering was fun but I haven’t applied that much to anything that has made any money so again maybe that was a mistake but you have to experiment to know where you need to be going and the web was also, you know how fast it moves so you never know what’s going to be around.

Ryan: OK so just to finish up then you have already touched upon it a little but where do you see yourself in the future ?

Ben: Hopefully ruling a small empire, err no well this empire here that I have now with Mark if we can build that into something that is able to support a few more people and get some more, I am not saying our projects have not been exciting , but some larger projects some more broader reaching projects we have had a few recently which have been really good, they have been improving all the time so if we can follow along that path and stay alive and keep feeding ourselves that’s been our objective so far and its been paying off we are both still here.

Ryan: Well OK fantastic and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me and I am sure people will find that very interesting

Ben: Thank you Ryan it has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Much thanks for to Shaun Hare (@sdh100shaun) for transcribing this interview.

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