Not a career history
Careers list what someone did. This page is about how nearly 20 years inside complex operations shaped the way Andrew works, and why that became North Focus.
-
01
It started with taking things apart
Andrew has always been a problem-solver by nature. Some of his earliest memories are of a fascination with how things worked and, to his parents’ amusement, of dismantling and reassembling the technology around the house. The instinct was simple, and it never left: understand the mechanism, not just the surface.
-
02
Engineering gave it a method
A Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering turned that instinct into a discipline. Engineering is the habit of looking past how something behaves to why: isolating the load-bearing part, the constraint that decides how the whole system performs. It became a way of seeing that Andrew has carried into every environment since.
-
03
Then came the operations
Over nearly two decades, first at Santander, then 13 years at Amazon, Andrew worked inside complex operational environments, where operations, finance, and technology are tightly bound together.
Colleagues came to describe him as a rare bridge between the technical and business worlds, translating fluently between engineers and stakeholders. He didn’t advise from the outside; he led teams and implemented the changes himself, with regular travel to the USA and Luxembourg. Technology was a tool in his belt, but the real work was helping people and processes work better.
-
04
The same problems kept reappearing
The more environments he worked across, the more familiar the problems became. The visible complaint (slow decisions, rising headcount, a team that seems to be struggling) was rarely the real problem, and rarely where it ended. Andrew found he could see the shape a problem was taking: the sensible workaround that was quietly becoming next year’s operating model. However large an organisation, the issues weren’t exceptions; they were patterns.
Most people see the problem in front of them. Andrew had learned to see what it would become.
-
05The conclusion
A pattern worth acting on.
Andrew reached a conclusion that captured his imagination: if these patterns show up inside an organisation as sophisticated as Amazon, they are almost certainly present, and more pronounced, in most growing companies. Most only address them once they have become expensive problems.
That is the reason North Focus exists: to see what a problem is becoming, and to put it right before it quietly hardens into the way the business runs.
Andrew is a devoted husband and father of four. Outside the office he’s passionate about American Football, music, design and, undeterred by Scotland’s wetter climes, an enthusiastic barbecuer, forever experimenting with new techniques and flavours.
It comes as no surprise to me that Andrew has founded North Focus. Helping scaling businesses build stronger operational foundations isn’t a pivot for him; it’s the distillation of everything he’s spent more than a decade getting exceptional at.
Built over years, across the boundaries.
Bringing someone in still feels like a big step.
It’s worth knowing what that actually involves: how the work runs, and how much stays in your hands.