Twelve Management

Greenfield IT for nine subsidiaries

Twelve Management is a management company with nine subsidiaries spanning property development, jet charter and retail. When I came in as Chief Technology Officer there was no IT function to inherit. I built the complete IT and network infrastructure from the ground up.

Running concurrently with the Budget role since November 2021.

What that meant in practice

Nine businesses in genuinely unrelated industries, each arriving with its own tooling, its own assumptions and its own idea of what "normal" looked like. The work was less about any single deployment than about deciding what had to be common and what could stay local.

• Built the network and server infrastructure from nothing: Windows Server, Active Directory, and the connectivity underneath it
• Established standardized technology practices, security policies and operational procedures across every subsidiary entity
• Directed cross-functional technical operations for a team of 52

Holding it together through growth

The organization grew quickly during this period, which is the part that actually tests an infrastructure decision. Choices that are merely fine at five users become load-bearing at fifty, and the ones made for expedience early are the ones that come due.

Holding reliability, security and scalability through that growth, while the subsidiaries kept operating, was the job. Standardizing security policy across nine entities that had never shared one is slower and less satisfying than a clean technical build, and it is worth considerably more.