Craig H.

“Craig is an excellent tech leader, line manager and generally an outstanding human being you'd like to share time with, learn from and obviously work with. Craig is passionate about technology, resilient, secure and robust integrated systems. He just doesn't lead well, he's also operationally and technically strong. Along the 6 years I've been working with him, he has demonstrated he can always go the extra mile whilst keeping team motivated and a smile on his face.”

“I had the great pleasure of working alongside Craig, who is an exceptional technical leader with a broad set of technical skills. Craig's hardworking nature is matched by his compassionate approach to teamwork and leadership. I wouldn't hesitate to work with Craig again, and any organization seeking a driven and talented technologist would be sure to see him make a significant impact.”

“I reported to Craig (Technology Director) for 7 months, after having worked together at Avado for about 1.5 years. I was constantly impressed by how competent Craig is, his seemingly natural ability to lead and inspire, and the level of professionalism he displayed even under the most challenging circumstances, but because of the way Craig is I never once felt intimidated by it. Craig has a rare ability to make others feel seen and appreciated, and I was often taken aback by the level of kindness and understanding he would show; one that can only be possible if you genuinely care about people; and how he would always put his team before himself. Craig did an exceptional job leading and supporting me through a period of uncertainty and organisation-wide structural and cultural change, and despite not being from a data background himself, he was a fantastic representative in forums where data SMEs were not present.”

“Craig was my manager for most of my tenure at Avado and definitely played a massive role in making it the mostly enjoyable job that it was. The level of professionalism in every aspect of Craig's work is exemplary, from the way he talked to the rest of the department to how he would tackle complex topics around technical and non-technical issues. It was fantastic working as a direct report because I never needed to parse out the usual corporate jargon. Craig just knew what it meant from experience and would translate it to layman's terms - a rare ability in my experience. Speaking of, the technical expertise! Craig was a bit of a font of knowledge for everything we would go to him for and, if he wasn't, you better believe he was going to a workshop within the month to brush up on the latest tech. Even if the answer wasn't something Craig knew, there would always be a focus on helping people to figure things out. That's a far cry from the usual response of "I'll just fix it then" or "You figure it out" and made for a much more knowledgeable department. Craig was also wholely unafraid of getting into the weeds with personal issues - something a lot of managers disregard in favour of corporate mumbo-jumbo. There was never a time when Craig couldn't make time for someone in need and even fewer times where he wasn't able to be flexible around people's personal requirements when things came a cropper. Overall, I left the company because Craig left and I stand by my decision.”

“Craig reported to me for 4 1/2 years while I was at Avado. I loved working with Craig. He has magnificent breadth and depth of experience - he loves technology, but he equally loves people, which gives him a rare combination of skills which was invaluable to Avado. It's difficult to list all of his achievements, but safe to say he drove a huge business technology transformation from old fashioned on-premise infrastructure, to a modern, reference architecture based on cloud technologies. And he did this at a complex 400 person company with multiple stakeholders to keep happy. Craig takes a high level of personal accountability, but also manages to get the best out of his team. He also does a fantastic job of getting a lot of output from a small amount of spend - he is gratifyingly frugal and careful with the company's money - looking after it as if it were his own. On a personal level, Craig was immensely reliable, but also a fantastic colleague to work with - he always takes the extra time to check in on how people are doing, and adds a very human touch to his immense technical knowledge. I hope to work with Craig again!”

“I had the pleasure of working alongside Craig for about 5.5 years in Avado's tech department, and briefly reporting to him when he moved into his role of Technology Director in 2022. In that time, Craig transformed Avado's business tech function from one that was barely functioning to one that was best in class. His huge successes include rolling out Office365 to a 400+ person business, completing a full migration of all of Avado's infrastructure to Azure, countless seamless office moves, and setting up Avado for painless remote working during the pandemic. Craig has a vast knowledge and hands-on experience of the tech itself, but he is also incredibly business and customer focused; his priority is to provide the service people need, and to make people's lives easier with tech. As a result, people could take high quality Avado IT for granted. However, I saw all the many, many hours of hard work that went on behind the scenes to make that posible. And to top it all off, Craig is perhaps the nicest person I worked with at Avado. Humble to the last, never had a bad word to say about anybody, and always eager to champion others' successes.”

“I had the absolute pleasure working with Craig. We worked together for nearly 6 years at Avado. He is well respected in the tech team. Infrastructure in the tech was outdated and expensive. He has migrated our exchange to office 365 and servers to the cloud. We were the first in Bleinheim Chalcot to be on O365 and Azure. Migrated from Logmein to Teamviewer. To oversee or phone system crossover to mitel. And to get our company devices on Intune. Not only is he Tech Savy. He is a people person. Would help even the littlest things like changing a mouse for a user. Very supportive and overall a great guy. Thank you Craig!!”