Meet Allan, For-Sight’s CEO and Co-founder! 

Allan’s primary role is to provide leadership and empower the For-Sight team to deliver a great product that meets the hospitality industry’s needs. Passionate about technology, Allan believes that data is a critical asset for hoteliers to deliver real results at scale.

We’ve asked Allan a few questions… what does he love about For-Sight, what are his downtime hobbies… watch the video to get to know Allan.

Read our interview below:

Your Role? 

I’m CEO and Co-founder of For-Sight.

I’m the CEO, so my role is leadership, strategy, vision and most importantly, people. The most important is to assemble a great team of people to take the business forward.

The perfect Day

Perfect day. It’s very varied. But it’s a day when we move forward. When we do something great for our clients. When we do something great, one of our people does something great or when we release a great piece of functionality that allows us just move everything forward and get on to that next level.

I get very excited by that.

Favourite city for an event 

And I’ve been to a few. There’s a lot more I haven’t been to, but obviously Edinburgh. We’re based in Edinburgh, I live and work in Edinburgh and it is one of the biggest cities in the world as it is right now.

Also, I’ve always been enjoying my ventures to London. I’ve been to Berlin a couple of times, which is a lot of fun. There are a lot of places I haven’t been to, so the answer to that question is placed I haven’t been to yet.

What you love about working at For-Sight

I suppose it’s the variety. It’s building a business from an idea to getting the first few clients on board, to getting our hands on their data to be able to develop the product around them, to develop the service around them.

And really, for me, it’s being involved with every discipline in the business, growing every different part of the business, having to be enough of an expert in the business to be able to build a team of proper experts, who are then enabled to do what they want to do.

So for me, that’s very exciting.

It’s continually chopping, changing, it’s continually moving around, and continually dealing with challenges.

And no day is the same. That’s really the excitement I get, the excitement and the energy from that. I think for me, it would be very boring doing the same thing every day.

So the excitement really is the variety.

Downtime 

I walk the dog. I’ve got a dog called Rocky, I do a lot of that. I play the guitar badly because I’m in my forties and decided I wanted to do something different.

I used to play a lot of rugby, I play a little bit of football. I go and see a lot of rugby. So whether that’s in Edinburgh here, whether that’s Scotland or if I’m back to Northern Ireland, to Ulster, I go to see Ireland. We’re a big sporty family going to do and watch – mostly watch these days – a lot of sports.

Best purchase and biggest regret 

The best purchase I think I’ve ever made is a great combination of technology and music. I’ve always loved my music and I’ve always loved getting technology to do exciting things its not done before. A few years ago, ten years ago, I invested in the first Sonos that I have around the house. I’ve got various different speakers in different rooms. And I just love all of that, the sound quality. That blend of music with technology is fantastic.

The worst purchase I made is kind of related to that. I bought an Internet radio about 20 years ago, which was a box and within a few months, it was obsolete because the software was built into the radio itself. It wasn’t a very good user interface with it.

Within a few months the iPhone came out, and the iPhone was able to do that ever since.

So, yeah, it was just a waste of £100 at the time.

Tea or coffee 

Tea!

Your mantra 

My mantra is a couple of things. It’s always be learning. Always be curious. For me, and I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly religious type, but it’s always struck me that: do unto others as you would have done to yourself. So, treat people like you would like to be treated.

If you live by that I think you’ll get through life ok.