Matt grew up around computers from a very early age,  with his Dad owning a computer business before he was born it was inevitable. Matt had a personal computer since before he can remember, what he does remember is using command line, in fact you had to load windows via the ‘win’ command to actually use the early version of windows (see image).

The passion for technology was embedded at a very early age, the mix of being a logical thinker and being left to tinker with his own PC set a spark that still remains to date.

Matt had the opportunity to work at the business in the summary holidays in his early teens. He idolised the tech team and couldn’t get enough of their IT knowledge.

After Matt completed his education he joined the family IT business as a technical engineer, and soon after began completing Microsoft certifications in the effort to upskill.
IT had moved on significantly and he felt the pressure to learn and catchup, by this point there were around 15 IT engineers he could learn from and the business had around 40 employees.

Several years later, the next step for Matt was a surprising one, his Dad suggested there was an opportunity to grow the data communications business. To work with data cabling, managed wireless and audio/visual solutions for schools. But before he could jump into this role, he had to prove himself as a telemarketer. A brutal role change, techie to sales in a hearbeat, this was a tough transition but before long he was a member of the data team.

Matt worked with many schools and shopping centres over the years as a technical consultant and solution designer, primarily focusing on managed wireless and CCTV.

But while Matt was busy in his own world, the business had taken a turn for the worse. Some poor decisions had been made that resulted in a series of business liquidations for the 5 companies his Dad owned. The business overnight had shrunk from 80 people to 15. Matt had been a director at this time so had to be involved at the liquidator meetings and watch his friends get made redundant.

Very quickly Matt had to grow up, suddenly he had to chip in to help save the business. With no IT account managers anymore who was going to help the IT business carry on?

Matt visited every single client, explained the situation and re-negotiated the IT contracts to suit both parties. He decided to offer monthly rolling contracts instead of the 3 year pay up front as previous.

The next few years flew by, Matt passed the account management positions to the two lead technical consultants and assisted his Dad on running the photocopier side of the business.

At this stage Matt was now fully invovled in the day to day operations of the business, from managing the property portfolio, to staff appraisals and everything in between.

An opportunity arose for Matt to take lead position as head of the IT business, an offer that he had been longing for since moving out of the technical team all those years ago, Matt jumped at the chance.

Before Matt eventually left his Dads companies, he had a fantastic opportunity to start implementing his vision for the IT business. He wanted to embrace more cloud technology and rebuild the team to the strength of before.

Lockdown changed everything, a fundamental disagreement found Matt abruptly walking away from the business. But he couldn’t walk away from his passion, the desire to run a cloud based IT business was too strong. This is where the Cloud Top Technology story begins, read below to see how it began.