Decomposing the Monolith with Jonathan Summerfield, CEO of Xiatech

In this episode of MarTalks, host Darrell Rosenstein sits down with Jonathan Summerfield, founder and CEO of Xiatech, to unpack how modern retailers and SaaS enterprises can finally escape the limitations of monolithic systems and move toward a truly composable, data-driven architecture.

Jonathan shares his journey from Marks & Spencer and Tesco to building one of the leading data-orchestration platforms powering today’s digital-commerce transformations. He explains how Xiatech’s XFUSE platform helps companies “decompose the monolith” by integrating legacy systems, unlocking trapped data, and enabling faster, incremental delivery of business value.

The conversation covers:

• How to prioritize composable transformation use-cases that drive immediate ROI
• Why data orchestration is “the new blood that runs through the body” of digital business
• Real client success stories, including a loyalty-program rollout that cut delivery time from months to weeks
• Jonathan’s leadership philosophy for building high-performing teams and a 93% “great-place-to-work” culture
• Lessons learned from scaling a startup, balancing failure with innovation—and even a little magic 🪄

Whether you’re a CIO, CTO, or founder navigating your own modernization roadmap, this episode delivers practical insight, authenticity, and humor in equal measure.

Listen now to discover why data orchestration—not monolithic overhaul—is the real key to digital agility.

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for more episodes and insights.

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Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to Mar Talks, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. Mar Talks is devoted to covering the latest technology developments that drive the global commerce ecosystem from advertising to last mile. Enjoy all of our content at Rosenstein Group.com slash March Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:21

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Mar Talks. My next guest today began their career three decades ago with one of my favorite retailers in England, Marks and Spencer, where they learned to deliver data warehouses for retailer. Later they joined Tesco, where they led some of the best practices organization globally and led some global digital transformations for that organization. And then 11 years ago founded Zatech, which is one of the leading data orchestration solutions for composable commerce, digital transformation. There's a mouthful for you, but I've said it before, I'll say it again. When he's not, he enjoys spending time with his three daughters and a four-month-old golden doodle that's hopefully not eating everything in his house. He's a big Arsenal fan, so I'm gonna say that up front. But if you don't like Arsenal, this may not be the podcast for you, but we're gonna plug on just the same. And lastly, he is a semi-professional magician. Welcome, Jonathan Summerfield. Jonathan, so nice to have you with us today.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Thank you for having me. What a nice introduction as well, Darrell.

SPEAKER_03 1:23

I try. I usually fail, but for today, we're gonna go with that one. But we're gonna talk about one of my favorite subjects today that the audience should be familiar with. We're gonna be talking about the shift from monoliths to composable iterative incremental deliverability or composable architecture. And for those who want to understand what that means, we have an expert, obviously, and yourself in the data orchestration portion. So, Jonathan, how do you explain composable transformation?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

I guess there's two ways you can explain it. You can explain it from the technical angle or from the business side. We at Zitech tend to prefer explaining it from the business angle, but intertwined within that is the technology-enabled business change that comes with it. So when we look at composability, really for us it's quite simple. It's how do you break down a big transformation program into manageable iterative chunks that's delivered and enforced through technology and technology change. That's really the essence of it. Now, beneath that, there's a whole myriad of things you need to do, particularly around the technology, but also what it does, it enables you to deliver business change and business value very quickly, whilst removing all of the roadblocks that would normally be in your way if you were trying to do that through a big, large monolithic technology implementation.

SPEAKER_03 2:43

You used a phrase that I love as a murderer. You say that what you do is decompose the monolith. What a does how exactly does X Fuse decompose monoliths?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

I'll tell you about how a company would go about decomposing a monolith, and I'll tell you about how Zitech and our platform XFuse helps with that. So if you think about in the past, 30 years ago, in fact, even before that, there were big, huge mainframes where you didn't have everything on it. So all of the functionality would live on the mainframe, and it'd be a huge load of code delivering lots of different functionality and capability within an organization. Then along came distributed computing, where you had lots of large vendors like Oracle and SAP delivering similar style to the mainframe, but on distributed computers where you were still doing everything as much as possible within one big enterprise resource planning system, otherwise known as ERP. Within the ERP systems, there were huge amounts of functionality, but the problem was he didn't really evolve. So as omni-channel commerce arose and digital commerce with multiple channels, the ERP platforms were constrained and that they weren't designed for online. They were designed for offline, working, manufacturing shops, etc. And the problem with that is if you wanted to change, you had to change the big monolith and you had to do a whole end-to-end test within that monolithic block of let's call it code. Decomposing that meant that if you want to deliver new functionality that wasn't within the ERP, you had two choices. You either extend the ERP or you brought in a new system which tried to then talk to the ERP. And that's what people did. They did a combination of both, and suddenly out came what we call a spaghetti architecture, where lots of best of breed but still quite big monolithic systems used to try and talk to each other, all point to point, with lots of communication going like this. So 18 systems talk to 18 systems, and suddenly you had an exponential amount of complexity. So decomposing the monolith meant that if you wanted to bring in a new piece of functionality that made the old piece of functionality in, say, their ERP system defunct, you had to strip that piece of functionality out and put it somewhere else. Decomposing, and with the approach to decomposing that big monolith, is the way of looking at that monolith and saying what business capabilities does it provide? Let's say it provides a hundred pieces of business capability. So you decompose the system into the hundred capability blocks that it provides. How do you deliver a best of breed capability in another system that enabled you to actually extend your organization and deliver business change? How XFuse does that is it enables the new piece of functionality, talk to the old functionality. So you've still got your old ERP system, but gradually it's fading away. It's what we call the strangular pattern. You're slowly shrinking the footprint of your ERP and you're bringing in new best-of-breed systems to deliver new functionality. That requires three things. It requires integration. So you need to integrate your old system to your new stuff. It requires the ability to unlock the data so you can share the data and orchestrate that around the organization. And then the third part enables you to actually view what's going on, i.e., the dashboarding, the insights, the ability to view your business reporting. They're the three things that XFuse does: integration, consolidate your data, unlock your data, and bring in analytics and insights to your organization in one platform. But learning the lessons of monolith, we do that in a modular way. So you don't have to do that everything in one go, you do things iteratively. And that's really how XFuse helps accelerate the move from monolith to best of breed composable.

SPEAKER_03 6:17

That is quite a summation of the whole process of moving from that monolithic architecture, our ATG users, our hybrid users, our web sphere users, our custom-built users out there certainly understand what it is and are looking at this potential digital transformation with trepidation, understandably, given their experience with those platforms and what was involved in there and the promises made and the promises fulfilled, maybe unfulfilled, and the issues that they've had ongoing just in terms of maintaining and making any changes and how difficult that's been. So the biggest challenge that I've obviously heard a lot of in talking to the CTOs and CIOs out there when I'm walking the floor in NRF or Shop Talk has been the data, managing the data. What really interested me about XFuse is that you act as a data switchboard and that's really a plug and play integration hub for this. That essentially once XFuse is in place, the retailer, the merchant or the business has the opportunity to decide what comes next, what's the first business functionality that we want to strangle? What have we, and it could be the one that's giving them the biggest pain in the butt right now? Could be if we just we have no clue where our customer data is. So it's like we need a CDP plan. But what I'm interested in is how does XFUS really make that, I would have to say business case, for what order they should tackle this transformation and how does it help them prioritize what they should be doing as they're selecting each module for that new commerce instance.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Thank you for that. And if you can find the answer to that, I think you've cracked the magic bullet.

SPEAKER_03 8:09

I like to wildly speculate, but I don't want to make things up if I don't have to.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

We'll talk about that later. You pose it a good question, and that's actually at the hub of what we do. So XPuse itself is just a way of delivering the technology and accelerating the delivery of those new pieces of functionality and extracting the data and unlocking your data. What has to happen first is the business has to decide what are the things that are most important. The way we do that as a company is we sit with the organization that we'll work and understand the business priorities. What are the business outcomes prioritized over time? And then we overlay the technology. So let's say as a business, you want to personalize your customer offering. Okay, what does that entail? That entails I need to get to probably a single view of my customer, and I want to deliver new functionality, new technology that enables me to deliver personalized campaigns and personalized offers. Let's say that's the use case, very common one. So the first thing you have to do, X views will help you untangle the mess of your customer data, unlock the data, and put it in one place. Create that one single view of customer data. If your use case is about product, we do that for product, we do it for employees, do it for locations, you can do it for orders, you can do it for inventory. But if you tackle things in the use case by use case that are specific to business domains, for us, if you can prioritize that as a business, the technology comes next. So we enable that by providing that single view of data. Once you've got that single view of data, you then need to orchestrate that data around the organization. And that's the second thing we do. We do data orchestration and integration. And then thirdly, you want to analyze what's happening, and that's what we provide through, say, your customer dashboards. Now, as a composable approach, for me, if you can understand what business use case use cases come in which order, based on prioritization, based on business value, based on lowest hanging fruit, based on the highest degree of technical inertia or technical constraint, then you've really got a very good prioritization method for having a look at what should come next. XFuse just helps accelerate that.

SPEAKER_03 10:09

Yeah, I like to think of it in terms of what's the biggest pain in the ass right now, and how do I alleviate it? And how is essentially the solution going to be a digital preparation age? In terms of many CEOs and CTOs I talk to, they're convinced that composable architecture is going to cost them more and that there's going to be more people and it's going to be more complex because it's multiple microservices that they're implementing over the course of their adoption. We know that's not the case, but I guess how does using Xviews mitigate those fears and actually accelerate and simplify that transformation on a roadmap?

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah. There's always a careful balance between increasing complexity of multiple vendors, multiple technologies, but conversely the benefit of having that business agility. So an organization doesn't want to spend two or three years doing a big monolithic program anymore. A business wants to deliver quick, incremental, high-value change, whether that's your big pain in the backside that you were talking about before, or whether that's new revenue generating opportunities. That's the advantage of going quickly. You can't go quickly using a monolith. Putting in a new monolithic application or trying to customize a big monolithic application takes a long time. If you can deliver quick, incremental new pieces of technology that gives you huge amounts of flexibility and agility and delivers your ROI very quickly. That's what XFuse is about. It's about enabling you to plug in those new pieces of functionality very quickly, turbocharge your legacy, advance and accelerate your digital transformation through delivering new, best of breed, very quick to deliver applications. Because you will have maybe 20 vendors eventually, and that does cost money, but actually what you get in return, I would argue, gives you huge amounts of ROI, more so than having a very large monolithic system to try and deal with because you're stuck in the technology inertia. Those companies that we have seen actually advance towards a non-monolithic composable architecture, have actually seen the virtues of a very fast ROI through time to value and actually reducing the complexity. But you do need that middle gateway, and that's really why we have X-Fuse. We only exist because of that move from monolithic to best of breed technology, and that's what we helped do. I've spent my life trying to figure this out using other pieces of technology, Mark Spencer at Tesco at LabBrooks. With me and my team, we bought vendors that did different parts of what I've described. We bought big vendors who did integration, we bought big vendors who helped us unlock the data, we bought vendors who helped us deliver analytics. I left LabRooks. I wanted to deliver a new way of working, and we use cloud native technology. It's born in the cloud for the cloud to deliver very quick business change, enables you to unlock that data, unlock the technology inertia and deliver new pieces of functionality very quickly. We are the enabler that helps that happen. For me, data orchestration is the new blood and the veins that run through your body. That is what X Fuse is about, and that's how we help accelerate.

SPEAKER_03 13:17

Wow. Data orchestration is the new blood that runs through the body. I'm a sucker for a good analogy. So kudos to you. Thank you for sharing that one. I'm always trying to share an example of where this stuff works. So, in terms of your experiences there at ZioTech, you always are talking about business outcomes. Could you share a couple that really have stuck out for you since you've been working? Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Maybe I'll take an example from a customer and one of our great customers, Blind Tiger, Copenhagen. They provide very small products that don't cost a lot of money, but you go in and you end up buying three or four of them and not realizing why you ever bought them. Any of those household products, for example, you walk in, you go through a maze, great products, great company. They went through a period of expanding globally through franchise. They also wanted to expand their capabilities and offering to their customers. So two parts. First of all, how did they expand internationally? They grew through wholly owned stores, but also through franchise. Now to do that, they needed to integrate those into their main core set of systems. What we did with X was we overlay their legacy architecture with X Fuse and we allowed them to build new gateways into that legacy footprint through us. We exposed them, it's what we call turbocharge or legacy. We exposed the legacy functionality through what we call APIs, which is in effect the gateway, and then the franchise systems now talk to us and we talk to their legacy systems. So we enable them to bring on franchise partners very quickly. The other one, a real example, and something they talk about was because we've done a lot of their integration, we're able to deliver new capabilities very quickly for them, or working with them and their partners. They wanted to deliver a new loyalty program for their customers. So a customer walk in store, they would buy stuff, they would join the loyalty program, and they would get discounts based off the loyalty program. Now, in a normal world, delivering a new loyalty system takes a long time. You've got to integrate it, you've got to roll out that platform, you've got to integrate it. Systems are not your data. We were able to accelerate the delivery of a new loyalty program in a matter of weeks rather than what it would have normally taken in months. By any chance was that Talon 1? The loyalty program, unfortunately not, but you have named one that we do work with. But it was a different loyalty program, not as sophisticated as there are others, such as Eagle Eye, we work with as well. But these guys are, and I actually have to excuse myself, I can't remember the name of the loyalty system that we integrated to, accelerated the delivery of that integration so much so that they actually were able to roll out that loyalty program across multiple countries very quickly. The net result is every customer who signs up to that loyalty program has now, they've now seen at least a two and a half times basket size what they normally would have done had they not had the loyalty system. We can't claim the benefits of the loyalty program, that's the loyalty program. However, what we can claim the benefits of are the acceleration of the delivery of that because of the integration we allowed and we took integration and data off the critical path of that project. There were many other facets as well, the business change, the great leadership that company has shown to actually do it, but that's a great example of delivering composable integration, composable platforms through their loyalty system and deliver that to their customers very quickly, accelerate time to value and decrease the time to actually doing that.

SPEAKER_03 16:42

Yes, loyalty programs. One of my absolute favorites. I love to be on a site where I was just going to be getting one thing and I end up with 15 in my cart and maxing out my credit card in the process. It's great to know who to blame and just don't open any unmarked postcards that you receive over the next couple of months now that I know it's you, Jonathan. Let's switch gears here. You're my kind of peeps. You found it a start, and in that monumental decision, you had to envision what you thought a great company was going to be. And part of it was authenticity, part of it was what kind of an environment you wanted to create for people. But from my experience, when you actually go out, you need to bring people on board to work with you. Getting those really brilliant thinkers, those creative and dynamic individuals that can thrive in a startup environment is it's critical. And it's also damn tough because there's a ton of startups out there, and you've got to essentially say, hey, come with me. I've got something new I'm doing. Yeah, we're a startup. We've got a one in 15 chance of even making it to a first running round, but roll the bones with me. So you've obviously been very successful at this point. You've got almost 100 people there. What did you do to start building a high-performing team there at Zia Tech?

SPEAKER_01 18:09

There were a number of things. I don't think I can point to one thing. So the company really started by evolution. I didn't wake up one morning and say, hey, I'm going to start a great company. I took the decision to move away from large corporates because most of my work was dealing with politics rather than transformation and technology. But I wanted to create a place where we treated people like adults and they could enjoy days working with us. The worst feeling you have is on a Sunday night, you're going to wake up Monday morning, you've got those Monday morning blues, you just can't be bothered going into work. So I didn't want to have that. And the one thing I took the decision when I started to hire people was I'm going to treat you like an adult. I want to treat you how I want to be treated. And working with so many people. Working with so many people over the years, you get to see the good and the bad. And someone actually a Tesco actually said to me once, you should treat people how you want to be treated yourself. And that's what he did. That's what I wanted to do. So that was the first thing. Second thing is I wanted a place that was fun to work at. Because I know if you have fun, you enjoy it, you're going to be more productive. You're also going to stay working for that company. And if you ever do leave, you're going to have a great taste in your mouth when you do leave. You're going to leave for the right reasons, and maybe you'll never leave. But I know you're going to do a great job for us and you're going to enjoy doing it. And that was my ethos. I wanted to create a place that was fun. I interview every single person that joins, and they go through a pub test. Not that I actually physically go to the pub. Bobber. But I want to see if I do go to the pub with them. Sure. You're hired.

SPEAKER_03 19:37

Thank you very much. I'm excited. I'm packing my bags. I don't know if my wife is going to deal with this.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

We're going to go with it. So I think there is a culture that we've tried to employ at the company is that everyone that joins really has there's a spectrum of how much fun you're really going to have. But actually enjoy yourself, have fun, come to work. If you're not having fun, tell me. And I say the same thing to everyone that joins. I meet everyone that joins as well. And when they join, I say, if you're not having fun, you gotta tell me. Slack me, send me an invite, phone me, tell me. And only because only then do I know you're not having fun. I can change things. So the company is small enough to make those changes. And I think that's really it. It's that good work lifestyle balance, treating someone like an adult and having fun. And we made sure we do that. We have lots of engagements with our company.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

I understand you've actually had external organizations rate Zatech as a great place to work. You guys got a 93% score, which is pretty great. And I want to know, did you pay somebody off to get that score? Or were there actually some leadership philosophies that you think contributed to that particular achievement?

SPEAKER_01 20:43

We definitely didn't pay anybody because if we had, I would have aimed for 100%. Maybe the 93% makes it seem more real. What was the second part of your question, Darrell? Sorry.

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yeah, your leadership making sure people have fun is I can dig that. I think everybody should have fun doing whatever they're doing. And if they're not, they should get the hell out or call me, because that's my job is to find them more fun. But what constitutes for individual A is different from what constitutes for individual B. And you've got to have a management philosophy that really encourages the leader to figure that out and to be a servant leader, to unpack what are the goals of the people that are coming to work for me? What are their aspirations? What makes them tick? And how can I deliver that here so that they become self-actualized? Because that's what every great leader or thinker is seeking to achieve is self actualization. But you've got to have a CEO like yourself that really understands that and is enabling that in the organization for it to happen.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Yeah, it's not just me, it's my team, right? I can't do everything. I've over the last five years hired an amazing Leadership team, and they all have the job to work with their teams to create that same environment as I've tried to create. So it does start from the top, agreed, but then it has to cascade down. So everyone has to be and has to have that great leadership capability as well. But beyond that, great communication as well and great engagement with the employees, making everyone feel like they have a voice, making everyone feel like they're engaged, listening to people. Our chief people officer, great lady called Steph, she has one-to-ones with everybody throughout the whole company, not in one day. But she does that over time just to hear them and make sure they have a voice and understand what makes them tick and understand what differences we can make to an organization. We run very regular, every week we do what's called flow. We have a pulse check in an organization. It takes one minute, you go through your scoreboard, score yourself. How challenging was the week? What did I find annoying? What do I want to change? So there's three or four questions we ask, and I can't remember what they are. But it's akin to that anyway. And it gives everyone a voice, let them be heard. And we also run social events. Every month we have a town hall where everyone hears what's going on in the business. I also have weekly coffee mornings with a sub-department of the company. They get to hear what's going on from me, I get to hear from them. So we're close where we have a flat structure, we listen to what people are telling us, they have a voice, they feel engaged. They're also working with the leading edge technology on the planet. There is no more leading edge technology that is commercialized than what we're using. There might be some real bleeding edge stuff perhaps somewhere on the planet, but not that's commercialized for our customers. And we're using it, and I think people embrace that as well. People come to work with the greatest technology. We have to deal with legacy, but we're implementing the newest, latest, greatest cloud-based technology that our cloud providers give us. Our team are using that, they're being trained on it, they're learning it, they have great skills, and they're just learning new skills all the time. So I think that all that combined creates a great workforce.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

I also gather that you keep your workforce very entertained because, as we mentioned at the beginning, you are in fact a semi-professional magician. Sleight of hand when it comes to jobs is not nearly as appreciated as sleight of hand when it comes to magic.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Curious, what got you into magic? When I was about seven, I was fascinated, little bits of magic. So everyone had the there was a magician in the UK called Paul Daniels, and he had his little magic set, which everyone got as a birthday present, little plastic toys where he did just performed. I loved it. There's a friend of mine who I also did it with. We used to do magic at each other's houses, and then we created a little business doing children's entertainment. So we used to entertain at children's park.

SPEAKER_03 24:37

Entrepreneurial at an early age.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

We were about, I think I was 12, he was 11, and uh yeah, we were called Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and uh we did magic at kids' parties. Did you have the hats and everything? No, we didn't, but we didn't want to scare the kids anymore than they were really scared. But we did that on brothers' birthday parties, and then we went on and did entertainment at other kids' parties, and then gradually we just evolved into more sophisticated magic and now still do different events where we still do magic, still perform. Same friend from your childhood. Same friend.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Oh my gosh, that's marvelous. Now, do you ever make the crappy kids disappear? Because I'm sure every parent is like secretly hoping that if a magician shows up, that's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

I don't think we'd stay in business long enough to do that, but we don't really do the kids' parties anymore. We're doing more adult parties, I would say. But yeah, it's great fun, and you can take bits of that into work. Some of the magic we do is based on NLP, neurolinguistic programming suggestion. I think you can take that into work. If you go in here, uh if you get trained on a good sales technique, a lot of that is around mirroring. So you're mirroring what someone else is doing, someone's nodding the head, you nod, the hand like this, you do the same. And that's the same with magic. You're engaging with the person opposite you or with an audience. And great salespeople take some of those traits. But magic itself, it's a it's all smoke and mirrors, a bit like technology. Go ahead and use it.

SPEAKER_03 25:58

I'll take the solution behind door number three, please. You, like myself, are a humongous fan of Ben Stiller's series Severance. And one of the things she said to me is that people really shouldn't have an any and an outie uh in terms of their work and personal lives. How do you encourage that? Or how do you live that? I guess I should ask.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Yeah, what is what you get? I'm the same in work as I am out of work. You know, I don't crack the same stupid jokes, maybe as I do in work, but it's all about creating that atmosphere where people can be themselves. And I really truly believe if you try and be someone else inside work, sooner or later that's gonna come out. You're not like that. And you're creating a persona that isn't you. That's why we do quite close interviews with everyone that joins. I want to see what makes someone tick. We have three stages of interview, right? The first one is a technical one, maybe not the technical skills. The second one is about more leadership skills and do they actually have good communication skills. The third one is myself and our chief people officer, we do a cultural interview, and that totally is about can we take them to the park? Can we have fun with them? Will they be themselves? What are they like as a person? What makes them tick? And for us, that's so important because the more you bring that into work, I think the more productive you are. And that's why we create such an open atmosphere and we treat people like adults that will have a great work lifestyle balance. Most people, a lot of people are remote. We have a central London office, you don't have to go there, but people do choose to. They have a good laugh when they're there. But if you want to work remotely, you can. If you want to work your own hours within reason, you can. And that I think helps make a great atmosphere. Listen, we know there are lots and lots of places where our staff can go and work. They can work at Google, they can work at other great technology firms. They come to us because I think you've got a great work lifestyle balance, you're working on great technology, we've got great customers, and we've got great people. And if you spoke to anyone else in the company, you would see a very similar culture across the organization. That's the way we work.

SPEAKER_03 27:51

We mentioned at the outset something that everyone in England certainly can identify with is you know what football club you you're most a fan of, and as we look behind you, it's very easy to see that it's Arsenal with a capital A. What was it that got you first excited and engaged as an Arsenal fan?

SPEAKER_01 28:11

I think someone bought me an Arsenal top when I was very young for my birthday. And also quite local, and a lot of my friends supported Arsenal. They were doing quite well at the time the year I was born. Arsenal did what's called the double, they won the league and they won the FA Cup. And uh maybe that stuck with me. Who knows? Maybe it was a subconscious decision. I'm pretty sure it was the Arsenal shirt.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

It's great, cool. So you got the shirt, you're a fan, you're going to the games, it's terrific. Yeah, and then you develop a taste for playing yourself. So you still play football?

SPEAKER_01 28:42

I do play football. Even at the tender age of 25, I still play football.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Ah, great. Are you a punter or are you an average Joe, or you actually have some skill at this? I joked, of course, about being the age of 25, but am I any good? I was gonna let you go on that, but now that we've brought it up, that's a gross exaggeration. He's actually 28. But go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

Quite right. So I play in an amateur league with many other amateurs, and for me it's about getting out and about and playing with friends. But we do take it reasonably seriously. We play in the league. I also play an indoor form of football called Futsal. I'm gonna represent the over 45 team of Great Britain in the upcoming Maccabeer games. So I'll be playing in that too. There's lots of other old people. Oh yeah. So I still got every I think everyone that plays is still quite injury prone, but we enjoy it.

SPEAKER_03 29:32

I'm injury prone without playing. I can't imagine adding that additional complication, but kudos to you for actually getting out there and staying active and you know not becoming a sloth, as I think I have. I'm proud of my sloth hood. So there you go. Now, I guess the last question I have for you in terms of the business and in terms of where you've gone, I always like to ask entrepreneurs what's been the biggest mistake that they've experienced that they've really learned from. And I've heard a lot of BS answers. So I'm gonna ask you what's the biggest error that you've made that really informed you and shaped you and made you who you are today?

SPEAKER_01 30:11

Well, you didn't warn me you're gonna ask me that question, so I now have to think about it. That was probably one of my biggest mistakes is not asking you what questions I'm gonna be asked. Let me think. Do you know what? I can't think of a big mistake. There may be occasions where I've said the wrong thing. No. Potentially. I find that hard to believe. You're a very likable chap. Thank you very much. I the only mistakes really are gonna be small minutiae mistakes. Hiring people that don't quite fit, hiring someone because you want to fit a bum on the seat rather than the right person. And that has led to mistakes with our customers not being happy with the people they've been given on their account. We've made that mistake for sure, and I think our customers appreciate if we're apologetic and we tell them as it is. We hired someone we shouldn't have hired them, we made a mistake. Are there any big mistakes? I don't think so. I don't think there's anything big because I talk to customers about this as well, right? When you're starting out on a journey, you want to go from A to Z. We call it Z. That's your journey. You know roughly your North Star is, you know where you are now, you want to get over there somewhere, whatever that might be. So the path is not going to be a straight line. The path is going to have quite a varied way of getting there. And actually, by the time you get to Z, it's going to have moved as well. Along the way, you're always going to make mistakes, you're always going to make good decisions, but actually the target is also going to move as well. So I think you can only learn from your mistakes. You can't learn from doing the right thing, you learn from doing the wrong thing. Now we've made technology decisions that might have been incorrect. We may have spent good money on wrong technology choices. We've changed the technology direction of the platform over time. I couldn't have known that was going to happen because we didn't know the new technology that is better than the old is going to come out. You realize that it might. You make a decision on technology, you stick with it, and then you change it. And whether you call that a mistake, I don't know. Perhaps we could have had the foresight to have not chosen a particular piece of technology and you lose money from that, right? You burn dollars in research and development on the wrong stuff sometimes. You make those mistakes. There are a few wrong people we may have hired that maybe didn't fit, but they're all great people in their own right. They just didn't quite fit what we needed them to do. I wouldn't say that's a mistake, but it's a learning. And I think we've learned now that the world's too small to really burn your bridges. So when we do make a mistake, we hold our hands up and say it's a mistake, we learn the lesson and move on. I think that's the important. I couldn't quite say there's a massive error we made at one point, and I can tell you what that is. I can say we've probably made quite a few errors on the way. As long as you recognize what they are and you learn from those mistakes, I think that's what's important. But I can't think of a mistake that's dramatic. So I can't be dramatic for you. Hopefully that's giving you a flavor anyway.

SPEAKER_03 32:45

I think perhaps because you started out as a magician, you really rehearse things to death before you perform them, that you develop this ability to stay away from unforced area and to avoid those pitfalls that come from not really preparing yourself adequately. Which is a wonderful set of skills for an entrepreneur in starting out a company. But invariably the best companies have challenges that are brought about through their own. They didn't know something was going to come about. You can't foretell the future. The wrong people end up in startups because you need somebody to perform tasks. There isn't anybody doing it. And unless you adequately screen them or have the right process in place, the wrong people filter through it. It happens every day. And otherwise I wouldn't be here chatting with you. But I think that you bring a good point up that you've got to embrace those mistakes. You have to learn from them. And you have to encourage your team members to chart the course and to take action. And when they make a mistake, not decapitate them. You don't seem like you're walking around with an But I could be wrong, Jonathan.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

I agree. You want to encourage people to take calculated risks, but also fail fast. If you're going to fail, make sure you fail fast. Don't take a long time to fail.

SPEAKER_03 33:59

Make it epic, man. We all want to know. We want to hear you screaming. We want to hear you going down in flames. So we can help you put it out.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

That's right. But listen, if people make mistakes, I don't really call them out on it. We do always have a post review to look at what went wrong and how to avoid doing it again. It could happen again, but we want it to happen quickly. And if it fails, fail fast. But take calculated risks. There's no point trying to create a leading-edged platform if you're not going to make mistakes and you're not going to fail fast. Because you will only learn by doing. And I think, yeah, we've got to take some calculated risks along the way, which means we will fail occasionally for sure.

SPEAKER_03 34:35

I don't think that this interview has been a failure in the least. I think it's been a wonderful interview. I've very much enjoyed talking with you.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

How do people get a hold of you? I wish I knew because I get so many spam calls on my mobile that I wish I could get rid of them. But there's multiple ways. We have a website, zitech.io. I'm Jonathan at zitech.io. Now I've done that. I am going to get spam. Oh heavens. I'm on LinkedIn. You can search me up on YouTube performing magic if you really want to. Thank you very much. But I've loved talking to you as well, Daryl. This has been great. And all the preparation you put in is admirable as well. And thank you. I'm very grateful for it.

SPEAKER_03 35:11

My absolute pleasure. Jonathan Summerfield of Zia Tech. Thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you for listening to us today. We'll see you on the next episode.

SPEAKER_02 35:23

Thanks for listening to Mar Talks, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and while you're at it, leave a rating and review. To find out more about how the Rosenstein Group can help you find the right leaders for your client development teams at Martec and e commerce, please visit our website at Rosenstein Group.com.