My CV is downloadable here to give visibility of the experience and skills I have gained in the Web industry over the last 25 years.
Doesn't need 'fine-tooth combing', really just an idea of what I have done in the past and why it leads me to believe I could be a good candidate to build a business such as this.
The link to download my CV is here (pdf, 215k, opens in new window):
Social Media
I have a healthy social media presence:
LinkedIn ranks #1 currently as I am an Advanced Sales Navigator, soon to be Expert (I know!). This allows me to reach influential people. It costs quite a chunk, but is worthwhile.
I also have two other sources of info:
The first is available at daveburtonportfolio.co.uk and is very image-focused, with screenshots of the various websites I have worked on over the years (opens in a new tab). Worth a quick scan.
The second is an informal, and relatively brief run-through of my life, and is right here...
About me
Music and culture ninja. Cinema lover. Gregarious. Foodie. Internet fanatic. Bacon buff. Entrepreneur. Virtual tour evangelist. Travel geek. Tea devotee. Humanitarian. Motorbike maniac. 0% beeroholic. Ozark fan. Cricket afficionado. Golf goof. Family Guy.
I attended Bolton School, well-regarded in the North-West (the school used in Fool Me Once actually...famous!).
I retain many good friends from schooldays - male and female - interesting to see how their lives have developed, we're all of a similar age (and disposition!).
I enjoy golf, watching cricket, football, photography, travelling, cooking (and eating), socialising, and have an interest in NFTs, some basic astronomy, history, art and ooparts (out of place artefacts).
Re photography - I own several cameras, lighting, light-boxes etc, and have enjoyed turning a hobby into a business.
I also have a passion for virtual tour photography, finally becoming an acknowledged tool for online real estate purchases, see Work section.
I have lived and worked in many areas of the country, and picked up many accents! Grew up in the North West, Wigan (pie-eaters to any Liverpudlians!). My parents, Carl and Barbara did a great job bringing my sister and I up (well, my sister at least). My mother is doing very well at 91; socialises constantly, great at bridge, keep-fit every week and proofreading this very plan as we speak!
Worked at Wigan Council in their Computer Dept, then onto Littlewoods in Liverpool.
Following this I spent a couple of years at JCB in Staffordshire (which included bashing around in some of their machinery occasionally – nice). Here I met Dawn, my future wife.
We married in the mid-nineties and went on to have two wonderful children, Joe, now 22 and a budding entrepreneur, he is very knowledgeable about online retail, having worked in that space for the last 5 years, and Emily, very beautiful (clearly they both get their looks from their mother!), witty and loving life back in the North East.
I speak to them often and we meet up regularly. Joe, with 5 solid years experience=-1at unybrands.com (creating a market for a guy selling showerheads that recently sold for £16m), is keen to be involved.
So whilst I adore both kids, they live in their own places, some distance away. This inevitably, has freed up my time immeasurably, enabling me to devote time to what interests me – and that, right now, is ecommerce.
After JCB I spent 17 years in Newcastle, specifically a lovely coastal town named Tynemouth, where we also owned, marketed and managed a holiday cottage and had other property interests. This was punctuated by two years in Edinburgh (favourite place) working in banking – 1998-1999.
More about 2000 onwards follows in the Work section later.
Dawn and I went our separate ways in 2007 and from then through until 2020 I worked and lived in London, great experiences, all web development, primarily front-end, taking on senior roles and leadership opportunities later on.
The lockdown saw me return to Wigan to ‘look after’ my mother (not that she needs it, she’s out and about way more than me!), and here I remain. Had a number of smaller contracts, and a foray with a franchise, but felt I was always looking for ‘something else’, did some due diligence around high-ticket ecommerce.
And saw a vision of my future.
Work
Please see daveburton.co.uk (or daveburtonportfolio.co.uk for a more ‘professional’ version, aimed at corporates etc) for my work history. But briefly….
As mentioned, I began my career in IT at Wigan Council. After a couple of years I moved to Liverpool, again all mainframe-based work – Honeywell DPS6 and DPS7.
I then had my spell at JCB which was great fun, colleagues/friends whom I remain in touch with.
Following this I took a three month contract role in Newcastle which extended some 30 times and ran for 8 years! Whilst still living in Newcastle, we (Dawn and I) both took roles in Edinburgh for a couple of years, before Joe arrived and we settled back in Tynemouth.
Around 2000 I invested £50k in a business which devised a method of printing onto ready-formed objects - primarily the Nokia phone which had replaceable backs.
It went well.
We encouraged our customers to upload photos, position them on their phone cover of choice, add some text, and order. Please remember this was 2000-2001.
This was called the Interactive Design Studio which I developed, and went on to present to VPs of Verizon, Motorola, Nokia, Cingular, others.
We developed it into a white-label, multi-currency, multi-lingual website.
I went on to win the Newcastle Journal Award for Online Enterprise. Which was nice.
The company eComeleon, was taken to the stock market (AIM) and subsequently taken over by Tanfield Group, where I acted as e-business manager.
Around 2003 I decided to move on and created my own Web Services company employing six or seven people and building some 60-70 websites, all to triple-A WCAG standards.
I found myself adept at selling our offering, and also chaired a weekly breakfast business meeting for a couple of years (BNI).
Whilst here I developed an interest in virtual tours and proceeded to deliver great experiences for business owners across the country and abroad. More about this is at daveburtonportfolio.co.uk.
The issue back then though was the prevalence of broadband was minimal, my tours took too long to load, and I had to move on.
(side note: Interestingly, especially in America, virtual tours are now becoming huge – there was a 2400% increase in searches for ‘real estate virtual tour’ in 12 months, 2022-2023. Similar for ‘short break virtual tour’, and ‘holiday virtual tour’. The UK stats are unlikely to be quite at those levels, but it’s happening. I always knew I was onto something).
So in 2007 I took a contract with Tesco, based in London, doing front-end development work. After several extensions I moved on to work at Honda and UKTV before working a lengthy contract at the BBC.
This was followed by two-years on contract at YouView, based right on the Thames and a perfect vantage point for both the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and as a base to be very involved in the London Olympics (without actually taking part!).
Following YouView I was invited back to Tesco to help with their grocery rebuild.
We worked to very agile methods and were highly successful in delivering an exceptional online ecommerce solution to cover their 200,000+ orders per day.
Beyond this in 2015 I worked at Currys/PCWorld, Left Shift, Saga, BNP Paribas, others – please refer to CV if interested.
So, in all a lengthy and successful career. Now in my mid-fifties however, I developed a yearning to be doing something different, whilst still being able to use the skills I honed over the years, and bringing experience from many different business types.
London
I got to know London really well, and have many great friends there.
I was initially living in Ealing, followed by Chiswick, a short spell in Berkhamstead, before settling in South East London with my then partner of ten years, living in Blackheath, Lee and Whitstable, Kent. Hi J.
Finally I bought an apartment in Royal Arsenal.
As mentioned, I returned North at the start of the pandemic, sold the flat and am very happily settled back in Ashton-in-Makerfield, my childhood home town.
2024
I started work on what has become Just Shops Ltd on Jan 2 2024.
Having found a clever usage of the word 'just', and subsequently 'shop', 'buy' and 'your', I now have 130+ domains, ready to become websites (I think of a domain as being the cocoon before becoming the butterfly). See Domains page.
(Update: April 1, 2024. Better make that 376 domains. Oops.)
By buying and owning these domains (it's relatively inexpensive to buy domains these days, maybe £4 for .co.uk, £12 for .com) my intellectual property is protected.
I'm very ready to move into the ecommerce sphere…with this amount of experience and knowledge, it would be wrong not to utilise it.
Finally, I'd like to refer to what came out from an assessment I did with good.co...
The test is no longer available online, but the assessment was:
Dave is egalitarian, idealistic, and open-minded; he analyses different perspectives and draws his conclusions methodically. He values fairness and respect for others.
(sorry!)
These are a few of my former clients.