I always wanted to be an inventor. Or a scientist. Or maybe a vet. I did maths and science A-Levels and, after a year working as a veterinary nurse, studied biochemistry at university. After university, I worked at my father's jewellery company trying to be generally helpful and learning far more about business than I then realised. I did half of a PGCE in secondary science but teenagers were not for me. I got a job at a chemistry company that supplied custom synthetic oligopeptides and spent a happy few years trying not to blow myself up to mixed success. I discovered the joy of ISO9001 as well, which was less explosive. I found myself as production manager and had no real potential for progression as the next most senior person in the company was the founder and it seemed that to move to a similar role at a larger company, like in pharmaceuticals, I would need a PhD or MBA, or both.
My PhD was around dynamic nuclear polarisation, which essentially is a process to make a substance show up very clearly in an MRI scan, specifically to help identify cancer tissue. I ended up going down a rabbit hole chasing one weird upside-down spike on my spectra but eventually worked out that there was an as-then undescribed effect where energy leaked from a methyl rotor system into the nuclear system that NMR observes. I did a conference talk about it (with three Nobel prize winners in the front row) and got a first author paper in PNAS. I had hoped to work at the partner company but they closed that department unfortunately. I was offered a couple of post-doc positions in the US but didn't want to move my family for a three year contract. In hindsight, I kind of wish I'd taken up the offer to the joint Harvard-MIT department but I didn't.
Instead, I had been making websites for people to help pay my bills and I decided to scale that up, resulting in a company called MS Internet. We had a great little system for taking leads for a simple website or app from a lead sourcing agency and managed to convert around half. We were one of the first companies in the midlands to make iOS apps and I remember the pain of upgrading to iOS 3! I decided that I wanted to move on though as I hadn't really intended to work in tech and I still needed to write up my PhD so I sold MS Internet to a local events and internal comms company.
I had to work there for 12-months and couldn't do anything commercial so I became a primary school governor and did a session with the school on how to make a website. That, somewhat randomly got picked up by the press and I ended up giving a talk at an event in London, sandwiched between the founder of Stripe and the head of Facebook London. I then got involved in the Computing at School group which wrote the current national curriculum for computing. I did also write up my PhD very slowly.
After my year of captivity, I left the events company because having a boss is not for me! I worked freelance as an app developer and also got involved in a few little startups. Howwlr was a collaborative comedy app, Job Box was a recruitment startup and Zammer was a revision app that came out of a hack day at Facebook via the guy from the talk. I also got deeper into the startup world and at one point had a conversation about potentially running an edtech fund for what is now one of the biggest early stage edtech investors in Europe.
Nothing took off significantly and I was enjoying being in school more than the tech and I decided it was time for a career change so enrolled in a PGCE in primary (3-11) with a maths specialism. PGCE year was unbelievably hard. One of the hardest things I've done. I got through though in the end. I also realised that teachers are paid really badly so I fell back on my tech skills to try and supplement that. Working with Rob, who became my co-founder at EdShed, we launched Spelling Shed, which was a relatively simple game to help kids practice spelling. A term later, we had demand for children to have accounts and for tracking so I spent my Christmas holidays building a rudimentary back end system. I had been working as a supply teacher, which was great for flexibility but I got offered a job at a nice local village school with a year 4-5 class. Spelling Shed however, grew and grew so I left that school after two terms as I could see that Spelling Shed was going places and we'd taken about 3x my salary by that point.
After that, I didn't really look back. Spelling Shed grew and grew then became Education Shed when we introduced a maths product. Then COVID hit and I was trying to run the company while homeschooling my kids and cope with a puppy on my own because my wife was a teaching assistant so had to be at school. Again, I got through though and EdShed marched on to now where we have several products, operations on multiple continents and approaching fifty staff. My biggest takeaway is that managing growth is so much harder than it might look and communication is almost always the problem.
During COVID I also bought the BJJ gym where I trained, which I rebranded as Three Points Martial Arts. That has become a nice little family business with my son teaching the kids and a beginners class, and my wife working on the front desk. That is a very different business in terms of the scale but it is healthy and a nice counterbalance of scale. We're still one of the biggest gyms in the area with a 6,600 sqft facility in St John's, Worcester.
Some time after COVID also, I had an ADHD diagnosis. I think like many people, it took getting somewhat burnt-out to realise but a lot makes much more sense through that lens. I was hyperlexic as a child and could read at three, and I have about a million interests and hobbies so I don't know how I didn't realised my brain was somewhat different to others. I realised that the reason I had such a diverse set of friends at school and that some of the more tricky classes I taught as a teacher ended up feeling easier to me was because of a common neurotype. We were different but also the same. That in turn has made me realise how lucky I am to have navigated life as I have with ADHD and led me to feel quite strongly about others having a fair shot at life despite the challenges they may face, neurodiversity related or not. I'm proud that both EdShed and Three Points has a very high proportion of ADHD and autistic staff & members who are able to succeed in those contexts.
My other hobby for the past few years has been horse riding. I, somewhat impulsively, bought a yearling showjumping bred warmblood who was to make ~ 17hh. She, Maia, has been my little project since then and I am thoroughly enjoying being able to ride her at last. That plus BJJ and climbing have also led me to try and get on the British Stunt Register, which I'm slowly trying to do because ... why not?!
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Find me online at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/martinsaunders