51: Why Every SME Should Start Its Sustainability Journey Now

Before we get into the sustainability side of things, can you give us an introduction, who you are, where you got to work, what you're doing and a little bit of information about Rubin Digital itself?

How did I get into IT? Well, when I was at school, I was a gamer.

If there was, you know, gamer 40 years ago.

But yeah, there was, you know, that was arcade games mainly.

And so I used to spend a lot of time in my youth finding all the latest arcade machines from the local chip shops.

And we used to have a little map that we used to go around and play Donkey Kong and Asteroids and all these different things.

Yeah, but I was never really that interested in coding because I wasn't particularly academic at school, but I seem to have had a fairly natural ability with computers.

So, yeah, so I went into IT that way and started off in a computer room in the basement at the very bottom ladder of computing, mounting tapes and running overnight batch work, working shifts and things like that into tech support.

Um, eventually, um, landed myself in corporate land and, um, and then IBM.

And that was my very early exposure to the internet, um, mid nineties, helping insurance companies go online, how to connect mainframes to the internet and, and things like that.

So, um, Yeah, so I kind of really got involved in e-commerce and in the internet right from almost the dawn of it.

In the year 2000, in fact it's the first of January, year 2000, I stepped out of corporate life and completely looked at doing something new and that was really I wanted to take my experiences in sort of big business scale that down and start my own agency and offer those kind of skills out to to SMEs and charity not-for-profit I went into partnership with a designer marketing agency and then I did a management buyout in 2004 and then it's carried on and evolved the business over that period so yeah so this is effectively my 26th year as a business owner and an agency owner

Amazing.

And can you give a little bit more information about what Ruben Digital is? I'm assuming it's evolved over that sort of period of time.

What is it that it does now?

Well, I mean, when we first started out, it was a natural progression.

Back in those days, it was new media.

And so design and marketing people, their clients were saying, well, you design our brochures, can you do our website? And so it was a natural place for me to start off working on that side of it.

But we soon realized that having a very deep tech capability is that we could do a lot more.

And people wouldn't traditionally buying complex e-commerce type tech off of designer marketing agencies back then.

So that's when I split off and evolved the business.

We very much focused on doing a more complex end of web development.

So that was joining systems together, a lot of e-commerce, and bringing in kind of like big world IT practice and discipline into a new emerging tech environment.

And so Reuben Digital over the years, we've evolved.

We do a lot in the gift card e-commerce sector, digital gift cards in particular.