Building Smarter Businesses with AI

As a school student I got some of my best grades in Design Technology at De La Salle College but I first got into computing through a love for gaming. As a youngster I built my own gaming PC with the classic transparent casing, selecting the parts and putting it together myself with pride. I always had a fascination for "the way things work" and that led me on to wanting to understand computers.

Design is a fascinating discipline that touches everyone's lives whether they realise it or not. Technology is pointless without good design. It proliferates throughout everything we interact with in our daily lives. It's not just about making things look pretty. From a simple fork to a quantum computer, almost everything we see and touch is design and technology that has been thought about, designed and created to make our lives easier. My mum once said to me "don't laugh at me for not knowing how to use a computer, I taught you how to use a spoon" and she's not wrong.

My time in Tanzania with READ International made me realise that problem solving and innovation does not require large teams and large budgets. This is why at SystemLabs we hire true problem solvers over people with certifications.

Brighton was where I really cut my teeth as a developer. I worked across quite a range of companies in a short space of time, from small agencies to larger firms like HighWire Press, and each one taught me something different. At a small agency you learn to be resourceful because there is nobody else to pick up the slack. At a larger company you learn how proper engineering processes work and why they matter when you scale. The variety was the best thing about it. I was building Shopify themes one month and large-scale web applications the next. By the time I left Brighton I had a solid technical foundation but more importantly I had learned how to walk into any project, understand the problem quickly, and figure out how to solve it. That is the most transferable skill I took into entrepreneurship. You are constantly facing problems you have never dealt with before and you just must figure it out.

I will be honest. I chose Jersey as the place to start a business because of the support network I have here. I could have stayed in the UK, and I am sure it would have worked out, but it would have been a lot harder and nothing beats starting a business rent free from your dad’s spare room, particularly just as a "super virus" hits the world. So yeah, family, and of course my co-founder Jamie lived here in Jersey.

Jamie and I had worked together on another project a few years prior, and we worked together very well. However, during that first project I proceeded to explain to Jamie everything that was wrong with the work he had done to date, and he proceeded to tell me that all the hard work had already been done. I'm sure he thought I was a know-it-all.

Following that project we went our separate ways. I moved to the west coast of Canada and Jamie remained at Jersey Telecoms. I was always quite business minded. As a child I was influenced by my grandfather who owned a small card shop in Belfast, think Hallmark but much, much smaller. He would send me cards, balloons, sunglasses and all sorts of things that I could sell on the playground and at car boot sales here in Jersey. I was even selling CDs on the playground at DLS (definitely not fakes).

So, co-founding SystemLabs felt like a natural progression for me as I had a good level of technical expertise through my career and a love for building web-based software, combined with growing up with a passion for business. I had thought about it a lot before I called Jamie, but I was in a bar on Vancouver Island one Friday night and I called him and proposed the idea of starting a business. "Sounds really interesting," Jamie said. "But I'm on a pretty good wicket at my current job, why don't I just have 10% and support you." I replied, "It's 50/50 or nothing." And SystemLabs was born.

When we first started Jamie was still at his current role and I was a resident at the original Digital Jersey Hub where there was an in-joke about "Steve's imaginary business partner." I was so glad when Jamie finally left to come full time with

Where do I start. This question really resonates with me as I have learned an extraordinary amount through almost the last decade running SystemLabs. Growing a business is not that difficult. Ensuring sustainable growth for your business is hard and it takes certain types of people to be able to do it. It requires an extraordinary level of resilience. 

Maybe I am a bit mad but only now do I truly appreciate how hard it is to sustainably grow a business. We work extremely hard and we achieved explosive growth early on, but "growth" is not necessarily sustainable growth, and growth without a solid strategy for continuing it will lead you into a false sense of security. I won't pretend that I know it all because I don't and I think that explosive growth and interest alone is not enough. You need to be super clear on why, what, and how you do what you do in order to sustain it.

One of the biggest turning points was when I started building our own internal software platform using AI coding tools. I replaced over £60,000 a year in third-party software subscriptions with a single bespoke system that I built myself. It connected all our data, automated our billing, and gave us a single view of every client. That changed how I thought about what SystemLabs could become. We were no longer just an IT support company. We had proven that a small team could build production software that runs an entire business. That is now a core part of what we offer to other businesses. I am posting about the journey on LinkedIn so check it out.

PayPulse came from a genuine gap we saw in the Channel Islands market. Businesses here struggle to benchmark salaries because the data just does not exist in the way it does in larger markets. When you are hiring in Jersey you are often guessing what to pay people, and that is not good for businesses or for employees.

What excites me most is that it is a proper data business. SystemLabs is a service business at its core, and I love that, but PayPulse is different. We are building a platform that solves a specific problem for a specific market. The two businesses complement each other because they come from the same mindset, which is using technology to solve real business problems.

I would describe my leadership style as direct but supportive. I believe in being honest with people. I would rather have a difficult conversation early than let something fester. But I also believe strongly in giving people the space to figure things out for themselves because that is how you grow.

When I was a developer, my entire focus was on solving the problem in front of me. As a leader you quickly learn that your job is not to solve every problem yourself. Your job is to create the environment where your team can solve problems. That was a hard transition for me because I am naturally hands-on. The temptation to just do it yourself never goes away, but I have learned that if you do that you become the bottleneck.

The biggest shift has been learning to communicate. As a developer you can get away with being head down, building. As a CEO you cannot. You need to be able to explain complex technical decisions to non-technical people, you need to be able to sell a vision, and you need to be able to have honest conversations about performance and direction. I am still working on all of that. 

It meant a huge amount. I will not pretend otherwise. When you are in the day to day of running a business, you rarely stop to take stock of what you have actually achieved. Winning that award forced me to pause and recognise that what we have built at SystemLabs is genuinely worth something. 

Professionally it gave us credibility in a market where trust matters enormously. Jersey is a small island and reputation is everything. Having the IoD's recognition behind us opened doors and started conversations that might not have happened otherwise.

Personally, it was validation. Building a business is lonely at times. You question yourself constantly. Am I making the right calls? Is this going to work? That award was a moment where I thought, alright, we are on the right track. But I am also very aware that awards are a snapshot of a moment in time. The real work is what happens every day after that. We must keep earning it.

The thing I am most focused on right now is optimising operations at SystemLabs and focusing on how we can do the same for other businesses through our business and software development knowledge. We have proven with our own platform that a small team armed with AI coding tools can build production software that runs an entire business. I want to bring that capability to other businesses in Jersey and beyond.

I genuinely believe the economics of custom software have changed. Building bespoke tools used to require six-figure budgets and 12-month timelines. That is not the case anymore. AI coding agents have compressed both the cost and the timeline dramatically. The question for most businesses is no longer "can we afford custom software?" It is "can we afford to keep paying for tools that don't fit?"

With PayPulse, I want to contribute to showing that Jersey can produce genuine digital products, we are not just financial services. We have the talent and the ambition on Isalnd and it’s clear that more and more people are willing to build.

On a personal level I want to become a Key player in the AI implementation space. Not as someone who talks about AI theoretically, but as someone who has used it to build real things. I built our entire platform using Claude Code and I use we all use it every single day. That hands-on experience is what gives me the confidence to help other businesses navigate this space. I want to share what I have learned openly and help Jersey businesses understand that AI is not some distant future technology. It is here, it works, and the businesses that figure it out first will have a significant advantage.