I'm Damon Randall.

In 1989, I left the UK to follow the Grateful Dead across America. For six years, I lived on the road — show to show, state to state, part of a community that ran on creativity, improvisation, and a deep love of getting completely lost in the music.

It wasn't a career move. It was an education. I learned how to figure things out on the fly, how to connect with people from every walk of life, and how to thrive in chaos. Skills that, as it turns out, are exactly what you need when you're building systems for small businesses.

When the road ended, I came home and found my way into the film industry. I started as a trainee in the camera department and worked my way up — clapper loader, focus puller, occasional camera operator — always keeping one eye on the lighting cameraman, always learning.

Eight years on film sets taught me precision, attention to detail, and how to stay calm when everything around you is moving at pace. It also gave me an eye for composition and storytelling that I still use today.

It probably helped that I came from a family that never sat still. My grandmother, Jill Craigie, was the first female film director in the UK. My mother was the first female photographer on Fleet Street. Storytelling, image-making and a stubborn streak — it was in the blood. I just took the scenic route to finding my own version of it.

I moved south out of London, found a 400-year-old property, and spent months refurbishing it to create Delilah — a high-end ladies fashion boutique. It was beautiful, ambitious, and where everything changed.

I couldn't help myself. While other boutiques were writing sales in notebooks, I co-built a bespoke EPOS system to manage our stock and sales. I taught myself product photography — ghost-mannequin shoots, lifestyle imagery, video on product pages — years before any e-commerce platform supported it natively.

It was then I realised — I wasn't a shopkeeper who'd taught himself tech. I was a technologist who understood retail from the inside out.

Photography work came in from other fashion brands, and I ran with it. Over eight years I built a photography studio from nothing — brought in an investor, grew the client list, honed the craft. Fashion, e-commerce, product — I shot it all.

Out of that came The Model Cloud — a platform to cut out the complexity of modelling agencies and give models and clients a fairer way to work together. It had real potential. But by then I'd started a family, and I chose to spend more time with my son. The right call, without a doubt.

Those years at home gave me time to think — and to start learning properly about websites, systems and integrations. Not just how to build a site, but how to make all the pieces of a business talk to each other.

The moment it clicked was The Loft Workshop — a paraglider service and repair centre buried in manual processes. I built them a website, yes, but more importantly a workflow system that connected their couriers, customer communications and accounting. It saved them two to three hours of admin, every single day.

I realised this was my calling. Not just building websites — understanding a business and building the systems that make it run at its best.

A while later I was having my own house extended. The builder, Shaun, was brilliant at the work — and emailing me at one in the morning, buried in admin. Old habits kicked in: I started asking questions. He didn't even have a website, so I built him one. Three weeks later he was turning work away.

Then we dissected his business together — how he managed quotes, invoices, staffing, ordering, the legalities, the clients — and I realised this isn't a unique problem. It was the Loft all over again, on every building site in the country. Many businesses could benefit from what I was building — not just Shaun.

And from there, Arqor was born — a platform any trade can use.