Jim McGuire

CEO & Co-Founder at KitchenLogs

I have worked in IT for 20+ years. I bounced around a couple of years after University from job to job and after learning about networking and all the operating systems I landed a great role. In 2000, I was the 5th hire at a US startup and the company grew into a global hosting giant (it was recently acquired by Rackspace). I was relocated to London in 2003 to build and run the company's entire European Operations. During this period I learned a tremendous amount due to explosive growth in the industry which resulted in opportunities and success for the Firm. During a transition period, I decided to put all that behind and I took on my last role at a street food startup. As things picked up we had to travel from council to council which required frequent inspections (usually monthly or more). One area of importance is having a paper-based binder containing your HACCP and Food Safety Management System. Coming from an automated world, I created my own online portal to save all my critical documentation. I automated my own food safety diary to go into this portal. I checked the legalities and I was in the green via the FSAs website. As well as making my life easier by eliminating the inconvenience of transporting the docs, I also reduced the risk of these docs being forgotten, lost or destroyed. I went further and created my own inventory control system, ordering matrix, integrated an HR rota and other online controls. 

The local health officers who reviewed my system were always impressed that a small street trading operation had such an advanced system. I often ran into ‘technophobes’ and had to disprove their narrow minds by showing them the law. Then several other businesses found out what I was doing and asked if I would help them. The eureka moment was when a pub owner offered to pay me to create a system for him, he offered my £1000! I did not take the money but knew I needed to get on this idea, and quick! This was when KitchenLogs was born!