Our team
Charley Davenport
Operations, systems and process guru,
freelance cellist, and crowd-funding expert
Malcolm Colman-Shearer
Founder, problem solver and process optimiser,
corporate refugee and composting ace
Rupert Snook
Systems architect, facilitator,
and Balinese percussionist
Katrin McKinnon
Admin annihilator, process perfector,
and ebike enthusiast
Our mission
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We’re not your typical consultants. Originally founded by Malcolm and some friends escaping from the rat race, we formed Optimi within Enspiral. Find out more about our founding story in this blog. Enspiral is a network of people wanting to make the world a better place, and we do too! It’s not big profits that get us going in the morning but helping people to solve their process problems. We particularly love working with businesses that have a social impact, since social impact makes the world a better place, and that’s what's important to us. But, you won’t have an impact on the world if your business systems and processes are causing you pain! That’s where we hope to make a difference, with our expertise in connecting and configuring off the shelf web apps.
Our theory of change involves working with as many people as possible to make working life better for as many folks as we can. Although our skills are in technology and systems, we value humans and human interaction above all, so we design our systems and technologies to have real human impact.
Part of the way we see the business world improving, is making the world more equal through how businesses are run. So, we’re making our company worker-owned, with a focus on looking after our livelihood. Enspiral calls these things Livelihood pods. All of the team has a say in how we operate.
We think that contributes to a healthier, happier place to work.
Our approach
Part of a collaborative network
We are part of Enspiral, a broad network of value aligned people focussed on social impact, collaboration and entrepreneurship. This means we have trusted relationships with professionals in many different fields who we can call on when we’re operating at our leading edge.
Avoid custom builds
Wherever possible, we'll adapt an existing technology to your needs, instead of building you something custom. Avoiding custom builds saves you time and money. In fact, the 'buy not build' approach is fast becoming the industry norm.
Small iterations
We want our clients to be happy every step of the way, so we don’t ask for big commitments. Rather we progress each project in small chunks or iterations. We don’t think we’re perfect; the more we can collaborate with our clients, the better the final outcome will be for everyone.
We're on your team
We believe in empowering our clients, not trapping them. If you want to own the solution we've created for you, we'll set you up to look after yourself. We don’t want to lock you in to complicated, expensive technology.
We’ll do it for you
Some of our clients prefer to give us “the keys” to the systems so they can get on with impacting the world. Outsource it to us, we manage any number of key systems and processes including G Suite admin, bookkeeping, staff onboarding, Zapier support, web app security and other tasks which are easier for experts at Optimi to manage efficiently than for clients with limited time.