G'day, I'm Neil Benson, host of Amazing Apps. I'm so glad to see you here.
I was always a hyper-curious kid, always putting my hand up to ask questions in class. 🙋♂️
I got very used to the phrase: “Benson, you’ll learn more about that next year.”
It wasn’t until my fourth year of biochemistry at Edinburgh Uni that I got a different answer: “Benson, nobody knows the answer to that question… you've reached the limit of human knowledge.”
The limit of human knowledge… how cool!
I loved biochem, but I didn’t want to work in a lab.
In my final year project, I created glow-in-the-dark 🧪 yeast using a gene from luminescent jellyfish. I had aspirations to create luminescent beer… but more on that later 😂
When I finished uni, I applied for various graduate roles but had no luck. That led me to take a role in IT recruitment… and I loved it!
Later I sold management consultancy for the Royal Bank of Scotland until they merged with NatWest and brought my team onto new roles in-house.
Then, after the “.com crash” made my next role at Interliant as a CRM consultant redundant, I began freelancing under the name “Increase”.
This turned into Increase CRM, a Microsoft CRM hosting company… and we became the biggest Microsoft CRM hosting partner in the UK!
By complete coincidence, the agency I hired built my branding around a luminescent test tube 🧪 resembling my glow-in-the-dark beer idea... talk about a full circle!
I sold Increase CRM in 2009, and I returned to freelancing, this time as Customery. I received my first Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in 2010, something I've clung onto ever since.
We took an opportunity to move to the US for a role with Slalom in Los Angeles and I ran their Customer Engagement practice (where I flirted with Salesforce for a while, but I’ve fully recovered now 🤕).
After having two babies born in Beverley Hills we decided to move to Brisbane, Australia.
There, I became a practice leader at KPMG Australia where we assembled an awesome team, but fitting in with Big 4 bureaucracy wasn’t my jam. For one thing, they weren't too wild about me starting a podcast, or blogging, or creating courses for the Microsoft community.
I left KPMG for a gig at RACQ running a team of 20 Dynamics developers on a project called Jupiter.
And then, in a wild turn of events, I teamed up with a few others from RACQ to build business apps as a Microsoft ISV business: Superware.ai.
Nowadays I run Superware, and also help teams build business applications and master agile practices with Customery.
It’s been quite a journey, but a whole lot of fun, and this is no doubt the most exciting chapter yet!
