About
I’m Matt Smith. I’ve always needed to know how things work, and I’m happiest when I can take something small I learned in one place and put it to work somewhere else. That’s most of my career in one sentence.
Where I started
On the ground floor: a helpdesk at a large diagnostics lab, with offices across several states, staff working remotely inside client sites, and strict state and federal rules to work within. I supported every department, from the front line to the department heads.
Then IT inside a state medical and forensic mental-health facility, where everything moved at its own speed, the regulation was heavy, and the environment wasn’t always physically safe.
Breadth
At Intrinium, a managed service provider, I supported dozens of small businesses at once, across different industries. Owners were protective of their businesses and careful with every dollar spent on IT, which is fair. It taught me to know my stuff, to explain it in a way that lands, and to hold a recommendation with confidence and humility at the same time.
Scale
As a systems engineer at a community health organization, I took escalations from the helpdesk and ran larger projects for the whole business and for individual sites across 25+ locations. I also owned the business-wide backup power system: making sure that in an outage the critical systems were the last to go down, and everything else shut down cleanly instead of frying.
Every seat on one project
At QIT Solutions, an MSP serving enterprise and mid-market clients, I started as a technical account manager: renewals, upsells, six-figure multi-year contracts. I kept recommending and scoping projects and then doing a good chunk of the work, and eight months in I was asked to help build a new projects team.
There I scoped the work, ran discovery, did the engineering myself, and wrote up everything support needed to take it over afterwards. I was most of the layer between the clients and the support team. Onboarding timelines came down by more than 25%. The case study.
Building
I co-founded Tetrium, a payments aggregator. I designed and built the entire frontend, and helped shape the API by working out what the frontend needed it to do. The demo caught the attention of a payments platform, and two of us went to work there. The Tetrium story.
Payments
As Director of Solutions at that payments platform, I was the layer between our vendors and our developers. I vetted each API and its documentation, ran complete UAT myself, and built the flows and the internal docs, so by the time work reached the dev team we already knew what was broken, what was missing, and where the friction would be. Then I worked the gaps through with the vendor.
I also ran customer demos and onboarding, and worked across time zones with an international development team, translating between developer detail and what a client needed to hear, in both directions.
The through-line
Two things show up in every role. I get to the root cause quickly. And I’ve learned to read people’s frustrations the same way I read a system’s. Leading a discussion in a room full of frustrated people is hard, and I’ve done it a lot.
What each seat taught me is its own essay: What I learned from every seat in the room.
What I’m looking for
I’m a builder. I want to be somewhere I can shape how things work internally, and see what that means once customers are involved. That can be a role on your team, or a focused consulting engagement.