Spotlight on Daishik Chauhan

Daishik is the founder of Crucis Consulting, a business that started out with him contracting out services as a software developer. Alongside that he also helps small businesses solve their software issues – essentially anything to do with data management – handling imports, exports, etc.

Your origins are outside of the UK, so what was your journey to get here?

I was actually born in India. My mum was born in Rhodesia and my dad in India, however, for various reasons, we settled in Rhodesia. So I was there, growing up in Rhodesia, when the changes happened and Zimbabwe came into existence.

I went to university, I did a degree there. After finishing my degree, and having worked for a couple of years, I took advantage of something called a working holiday, which is offered to Commonwealth citizens to come to work in the UK. I took that up, and I was here for about a year and a half doing odd jobs in the IT space. I met my wife after about 18 or 19 months and that is how I ended up becoming a resident and then eventually becoming a citizen.

I never set out to get into the software business. I don't think I was even particularly interested in it. Even though I recall being reasonably good at it in those modules I did for my engineering degree course.

However, it turns out that I was rather interested in solving problems, breaking them down and coming up with solutions. That works out reasonably well in most technical subjects, including engineering. After I left university, and even before that, I was working for an IT company. That was basically involved in sorting out solutions for various problems and that’s how I became interested in software.

When I came to the UK I worked for a bank and ended up getting getting involved in user interfaces and data management and took to it like a duck to water. And now I have been doing IT for 20 years.

If someone is looking to invest in software, what would your advice be?

I think the first step is always to research what's already on the market as pre-packaged software or software as a service.

Those sort of options will always be cheaper, simply because you have a monthly subscription, and the software's already been developed. Also the support is already in place and any bugs in the software have either already been identified and fixed. Or if they aren’t identified, it's going to be a problem shared amongst lots of different users of that software, and there's a greater chance that those bugs will be found and fixed quickly. If you find something which doesn't quite work for you, then you can start looking at whether there's a customization for the closest matching software.

For example, if you're building a website in WordPress, the basic WordPress platform doesn't do everything. But what WordPress does come with is loads and loads of plugins, which you can install on your WordPress solution and get the functionality you want. See whether there is something out there which will integrate with your existing system, because that will typically also be supported by the software vendor due to large usage.

Thirdly, if either of those two things don't work for you, then you can start thinking about bespoke software. You need to be very clear as to what it is that you want your bespoke software to do to make sure you specify it in the right way.

How do you work with clients?

My way of working is to spend several days writing the specifications. My approach is to work with the clients to identify the problems and present them with a suitable roadmap or strategy to work through the issues. It doesn't always have to be a software solution.

For every line of code you write, you got the potential of introducing a bug. It’s important just to write the code which you absolutely need. It doesn't always have to be new software, it could mean using existing software or systems in more effective ways.

One of the customers I spoke to had already bought software and didn't know that the software they bought did some of the functionality, which they were asking for. That sometimes happens.

It is about cutting waste or wasted resource usage. If they've got resources in the cloud, or optimising their existing systems, like the database, queries might be running slow. There are things which can be done about that without new or bespoke software.

I'm not really interested in revolutionising anyone's business. I believe in simplicity and incremental, gradual changes wherever possible. I try to help businesses merge software and technology into their operational landscape. It's not about something that they necessarily need to splurge out huge amounts of money on every few years and then forget about it. It's an ongoing thing. I think it needs to be dealt with as an operational cost, rather than a big investment.

“The cloud” seems to be the thing in recent years, what's your view on that? How has software evolved?

I think there's two ways of looking at it, there are some clients who really want to maintain control over their own infrastructure. Either because they're concerned about security, or they just liked the idea of having their data and their applications on the premises, which they have ready access to.

The cloud is or can be quite anonymous, because it really is just rented space in a data centre, which could be anywhere. When people do go to the cloud, what they do get is a near-unlimited, pay-as-you-use, amount of resource, both in terms of computation, but also storage, which they don't need to think about in terms of individual servers or individual pieces of infrastructure. That can be quite liberating for some businesses.

Businesses can benefit particularly when it comes to things like patching servers, or security updates, the configuration of the firewalls and so on. Those things can make a difference in some organisations where they have a huge operational cost on the infrastructure side of things.

The other aspect of IT that is becoming more and more in the news is security and cybercrime. So as a developer, is that something that you've always been conscious of?

It's something which has always been there. But it has come to the fore because there's been a lot of highly publicised security breaches in recent years. And people's expectation of privacy and data security has gone up as well. There are a lot of steps that can be taken as part of the software development process to mitigate a lot of the risks. Some of them have been around for a long time and some of them are evolving. It's a vicious circle - the more the software developers and the IT experts beef up security, the more an incentive there is for the cybercriminals to up the ante and develop tools to circumvent those!

Do you think that small business owners don't think that they're likely to be affected by cybercrime?

Because there are far greater numbers of smaller businesses, statistically, the likelihood of one individual business being hit by a ransomware attack or some sort of hacking incidents are quite low as an individual, or small business. However, the number of small businesses which do get hacked is actually quite high. The last figure I saw it was around 30 something percent - so it's not insignificant. The other issue is that smaller businesses typically do have less security. They commonly can't afford their own security experts and somebody watching their IT systems like a hawk. So they're potentially an easy target from that respect.

I think that sort of complacency is not a good idea at all. Because chances are, that if a large organisation gets hit, then they've got the staff on hand to help bring the systems back up. They may suffer reputational damage, but they're more likely to recover. Whereas an attack on a small business may quite possibly be terminal.

What do you think makes you different from your competitors?

I think the first thing is, I am personally interested in solving the problems.

I bring a personal interest and interaction to the way I do business.

I make it perfectly clear, I'm not actually selling technology, or even necessarily the software. I believe I'm solving the problem. I try and build a relationship in that respect with owner managers, and staff as well in those organisations. The proposals I make, and the solutions that offer are good fit around for managers and or for staff, also do my utmost to explain what I'm doing and why. Without jargon, and especially when I'm dealing with non-technical people.

The other thing, which I think is a little bit different, which I was surprised about when I first started to talk to small businesses, is that I seem to operate in a slight niche in the technical space in which I work. Most small businesses tend to work around WordPress, and the languages and databases, which surround that sort of platform. Whereas I focus almost exclusively on the Microsoft. So, Windows desktop, Windows Server, and Azure for the cloud platform.

What would you say is the biggest challenge that you've faced?

For me, I suppose me personally, I'm probably my biggest challenge, right?

I have introvert tendencies, and it doesn't make it easy for me to network and go out and put myself out there and do one-to-ones or even blow my trumpet on social media.

That's not to say I don't work well with people, I genuinely do. It takes me a while to get to know them and build up that sort of rapport. The funny thing is, despite the common perception in the media and movies, software development isn't a lonely activity. There are quite a few people involved in the creative process. You can't write anything, get any requirements or get any feedback without interacting with people, which I genuinely enjoy.

It's just that initial step. That's always a big challenge for me.

If you were going to give one top tip for business, what would that be? My top tip is don't try and do everything in one go.

Think about software as something that grows with your business. Start off with a small system, make sure that the software developer you're working with understands that this is not the be all and end all. You can ask for enhancements in the future. Nothing's worse than trying to do everything in one go. The second worst thing is building a small system, which can't be updated. So, you need to hit that middle ground, and you need to talk to your software provider about that.

Technology moves remarkably quickly, even in the web application space. What you don't want to do is blow your entire budget for the next three years on a package which you know, within a year and a half or two years starts to look dated. You're far better having a system which evolves with time, that you can reskin make it look more exciting, or enhance from time to time without having to go into the code afor expensive and time-consuming re-writing.

Video: https://youtu.be/F0Bn6fDobec