A long time ago I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and worked for Touche Ross in the City of London as an audit senior.I went on to take an MBA degree at Bradford University School of Management, then one of the top half dozen business schools in the UK, based in Yorkshire, my home county. From there I joined Imperial Chemical Industries, the UK's largest industrial company. Within 5 years I was senior manager in a team controlling £1bn of turnover. This is also where I gained my first IT experience using departmental Apple 2 micro's as well as becoming competent to develop programs for IBM mainframes.My next move was to start an IT business selling turnkey business solutions based on PDP-11s, IBM PCs and later on Microsoft networks and Unix. Over the years we sold about 100 systems to companies of various sizes and at its peak (early 90s) I had a staff of 33 with offices in London and Harrogate, Yorkshire. I have never been able to sell solutions that I did not fully believe in, so when the technology in that business became trailing-edge (COBOL based 4GL), I sold it and started a new one based on Navision, one of the first Windows based enterprise accounting solutions which is now owned by Microsoft and sold under the brand of Dynamics-NAV. That was in 1997.After 12 years and having built another client base of more than 70 companies and institutions (including Hays Plc, Croda, Halcyon Business Solutions, Kavli Foods, and Dept. of Education Sure Start and developing Brew-IT which was sold under royalty to many brewing groups including Carlsberg and Interbrew, I became disillusioned with the technical capabilities of the solution and the tardiness, and apparent inability of Microsoft to modernise it. I was more convinced of this when I discovered NetSuite in 2007. So again I sold an existing end-of life-cycle business and this time started as a specialist developer of NetSuite add-on solutions.