About Matrix9

Duncan started his working life in the late 90s, working for 12 years in leading London advertising media agency, Vizeum UK (rebranding in 2021 to iProspect).

Whilst there he quickly discovered an affinity to, and hey, maybe even a bit of love, for Microsoft Excel. He quickly realised that whilst Excel was used extensively in the agency, most users barely scratched the surface of what is could do. Very quickly he went about increasing his skill with the app, both self-taught and via more traditional training courses. Before long he was fixing and improving spreadsheets across the business, culminating, towards the end of his career in Vizeum, in the building of ‘The Salmon’. Vizeum spend hundreds of millions of pounds every year on TV advertising, but there was no centralised system for planning the spend. Different teams had developed their own solutions, but this led to occasional errors, not to mention difficulties when look at plans across different teams. So Duncan was tasked with building a bespoke system, from the ground up, to deliver an advanced Excel spreadsheet that could be used to plan TV across the agency in the same way across all teams. And so ‘The Salmon’ was born, and despite leaving the agency y a year or so later, the Salmon remain in use for many years.

After leaving Vizeum Duncan moved to Sky TV where he was Head of Media Planning responsible for the £50m+ annual UK brand advertising budget. Whilst there he began to develop his skills in the VBA programming language, skills that would eventually lead to Matrix9.

Duncan left Sky after 4 years, and set up a ski chalet business, a markedly different career, but one that introduced him to being a small business owner – and the realisation that meant he became all department at once – sales, marketing operations, finance, IT. And it was this in this role that the skills really began to develop. It became clear early on that, unless key business tasks could be successfully automated then the admin workload would take as much time, if not more, than the key areas of running the business.

So Excel worksheets were developed with VBA to automate the process of formatting regular bank downloads and auto-applying key business cost codes, reducing time spent on finance whilst increasing finance accountability and reducing errors

A comprehensive Access database was developed to deal with the vast majority of key customer interactions. Initial enquiry emails were automated, as were customer booking form and and invoicing, plus automatic processing of bookings for key extras such as lift passes and airport transfer. In short, virtually all of the repetitive tasks that are needed for each and every booking were as automated as they could possibly be. This app, SNOWbiz, has saved hundreds if not thousand of man hours since it was introduced in 2012.

And a mobile app was quickly developed using Microsoft Power Automate system that allowed for quick capture of hot tub testing data (data that was previously captured on paper) allowing for fast an accurate identification of problems – hot tubs are rightly heavily regulated for safety so having access to instant information from the teams in the chalets was a real game-changer.

It was this constant desire to automate away the boring jobs that led Duncan to set up Matrix9. There are lots of small business that would greatly benefit from such automation, but don’t have the skills to do it themselves, or the budget for fully fledged IT systems. So why not use the skills developed over 20 years in business to help others free up their workload and spend more time actually running their business. And so Matrix9 was born.

(And in case you were wondering about the name, in his 20s Duncan would often find himself being asked to sort out a ‘matrix’ for calculating costs between a group of friends when on holiday or at a restaurant. Pretty soon it because a running joke (“Duncan will do a matrix”) – and of course, wherever possible, the matrix would be done in Microsoft Excel (the ultimate matrix when you think about it!). So that’s matrix. As for 9, well, we just thought it sounded right!)