Smartebusiness Behind the Scenes

This will be the first of a series of posts where we invite you ‘behind the scenes’ of Smartebusiness. We will introduce the team that makes Smartebusiness tick (and your Magento site click), divulge in office tomfooleries and share with you personal and collective achievements.
Tasked with the first post, I feel it is only fair to give you insight into all of the above. I am a Manchester born graduate who started my tenure with Smartebusiness in January 2015, as a Client Manager. I am a keen cricketer and have a passion for landscape paintings and photography. I look forward to seeing more of the world in my 20’s, taking aesthetically inspiring photographs with my fisheye camera along the way. My most recent venture saw me in the captivating Amsterdam, which has the feeling of a city far beyond it size. Quaint and quirky during the day and untamed at night, I found this city most inspiring after sunset, aglow from the bridges and canals.

Having settled in nicely, I have now become accustomed to most of the office eccentricities. Turbo Day requires the mass ordering of pizza. Cake Day, marking the annual anniversary of employment, confusingly requires one to bring in an extensive variety of glazed donuts. I feel like a trick has been missed not coining this celebration Donut Day, as it trips off the tongue, however the greatest debate must ask, are donuts cakes? Personally I think not, however such a polemic discussion is for another time, another blog. Ian has yet to convince the office of Naked Friday’s. I have yet to witness a Turbo-Cake Day, and I am unaware if such a day has ever occurred, nevertheless, I can only hope for such an occasion of calorie fuelled productivity in the future. I cannot even fathom Naked-Turbo-Cake Friday, but my mind wonders.

Recently we’ve had an eventful time in the office. It has been raining sticky-notes with the new addition of our Kanban board as we look to improve our workflow. I was the victor in the first of many client manager table-tennis matches – commiserations to Annabel who was a worthy adversary. The office also revelled in the beauty that was the total solar eclipse, as we all stood together in morning twilight.The Manchester cloud did its best to underwhelm, but like a good Turner painting, it only added to the spectacle.

My personal goals for the upcoming month are to read the revisited edition of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”, avoid getting a duck in the first game of the cricket season and to take more fisheye photographs!

Yasin Howell – Client Manager