CustomerSure is a customer feedback SaaS firm based in Newcastle, working with the likes of Philips and the Digital Marketing Institute.
The company was set up in 2010 by former senior executive at Sage Group, Guy Letts alongside Chris Stainthorpe.
Prior to co-founding CustomerSure, Stainthorpe was head of software at online business news platform Bdaily.
Here, he shares all the lessons he’s learnt across his career and personal life.
Which single daily habit or practice could you not do without?
I don’t have many ‘rituals’, but I am known for the scary amount of food I eat. I think without hourly snacks, I’d be a worse person to be around.
What’s been your luckiest break?
It’s easy to seize certain really ‘visible’ moments where your life obviously changed path, but I think a lot about all the sliding doors moments that we’re not even aware of, like where we won “that” Tier 1 client but working with them damaged the business. I try not to dwell too much on what’s happened because we never know how ‘luck’ would have caused the alternatives to play out.
if I have to pick, it was good luck to be thrown together with my co-founders, who’ve worked so many hours over the past 13 years to make our business a success. Also, I guess my now-wife getting a part-time job upstairs from our first office wasn’t a bad break.
What’s your best failure?
My most glorious failure is dropping out of a 112-mile ultra-marathon at mile 90, after 24 hours of running, when I was in a comfortable first place.
Maybe I could have won, but equally maybe I’d have been helicopter-rescued from a grouse moor in the middle of the night, five miles from the finish. We’ll never know.
Even though I failed to finish, it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever experienced.
What is the best investment you’ve ever made, either financial or time?
It would be hard to argue that three years spent studying computer science at the end of the 90s hasn’t paid for itself a few times over. This was before the government had you paying back tuition fees for the rest of your life, kids.
Equally, the investments I’ve made in CustomerSure are now finally starting to repay themselves, after a very un-glamorous long haul.
Which podcast or book would you recommend others to read and why?
I’d struggle to pick one, but I always come back to the books of Iain M Banks. I find his luxury communist space utopia such an appealing vision of what a civilisation can be if it chooses to. He always manages to balance the ‘light’ of the setting with the ‘dark’ of what happens around the edges. I say dark, I mean ‘pitch black’.
He wrestles at length with the morality of wielding near-unlimited power, and it baffles me that his books are so popular with billionaires who manage to miss these moral meditations completely.
Failing that, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey.
What one piece of advice would you give your 21-year-old self?
Talk less, listen more. A vital skill and one I think we’ve got a really good hold of within team CustomerSure. I’m proud of that aspect of our culture and it informs a lot about the way we work with our clients, too.
Who or what has had the single biggest influence on your working life?
The obvious one is my parents, as they’ve been an enormous influence. They brought me up properly, taught me wrong from right, and showed me that you’ve got to graft a bit to make things happen.
Parents aside, I take inspiration from a huge number of working professionals who spend years crafting a product to be as perfect for its intended purpose as possible: doing it for the love of a job well done, rather than the kudos.
Bram Moolenaar, the (sadly recently deceased) creator of the “Vim” programming text editor is a great example. He spent 31 years on Vim, always evolving it to be an increasingly good fit for the job it’s supposed to do, without taking it away from the foundations which made it popular.
Tell us something about you that would surprise people.
It’s hard to surprise people these days, we’ve all seen the wildest humanity has to offer thanks to social media. Did already I mention that I once ran for 90 miles for fun?
I took up chess as an adult, I’m completely in love with it, and I now coach at a local kids’ club.
If there was one thing you could change about your career, what would it be and why?
Although I’ve been lucky enough to work as part of a few talented, creative teams, I think my biggest career regret is that I haven’t travelled more.
Everything good I’ve done, I’ve done from an office in Newcastle, or from a home office somewhere around the North East.
I love our region, we’re lucky to have it, but at the same time, I wish I’d taken the chance to live and work in other places in the world before the time came to settle down here.
What does success look like to you?
Being at peace with yourself and your legacy.
