Ben Portsmouth and the summer job that kept going

Ben Portsmouth found a summer job at his local Pizza Hut delivery store while he was at university. It was supposed to supply pocket money. Instead, it supplied a different future. He became a driver, then a store manager, then moved into loss prevention. University could wait. The orders, presumably, could not.

That detour explains a good deal about the founder and CEO of Andromeda POS. Portsmouth works in software, but the problems that occupy him belong to the restaurant floor: getting food out, keeping track of drivers, understanding whether a customer will return. His route into technology passed through the business he now serves.

There is a certain advantage in having once been responsible for the shift. A delivery system looks different when you have to answer for the delivery. Portsmouth’s career has kept those two perspectives close together, even as the tools and the routes to the customer have changed.

The summer job that changed the plan

He remembers being interested in technology as a child and describes his younger self as geeky. The Pizza Hut job gave that interest somewhere practical to go. In his account, he progressed quickly from driving to managing, turned around a poorly performing store and was asked to work at head office.

His company biography also places him at Wimpy earlier in his working life. The restaurant business became his education in how things go wrong and what it takes to put them right. Managing a unit and examining losses offered different views of the same operation: what happened during service, and what the numbers said afterwards.

Eventually he left Pizza Hut to start Andromeda without outside funding. He recalls beginning at home with £500, in his early twenties. It is a small, domestic beginning for a business concerned with connecting so many moving parts. There was no grand distance between the founder and the work.

“But Andromeda is my life's work.”

Ben Portsmouth

That is how he has described the company. The phrasing helps explain his continuing attachment to it. A business built from a problem you remember having yourself can remain personal long after it has acquired a team, a product range and customers whose operations are larger than your own once were.

A customer who opened the door

Consider Herbies Pizza. In 2019, the chain and Andromeda marked what they described as 25 years of working together. Herbies director Avi Brar recalled Portsmouth coming into restaurants to observe their difficulties, then adapting the platform around what he had seen. The visit mattered as much as the eventual feature.

Brar’s account offers a useful picture of Portsmouth at work. The restaurant supplied the awkward particulars. Portsmouth could watch them unfold, ask what needed changing and take the problem back into the software. The relationship developed through repeated contact with the operation itself.

The platform’s work for Herbies included information to help plan staffing, drivers and preparation. These are decisions with a clock attached. A forecast earns its keep when someone can use it to arrange tomorrow’s shift. A restaurant does not get much comfort from a beautifully organised account of yesterday’s avoidable queue.

Another relationship followed a different route into the business. Muhammad Mehmood ran a London delivery operation and used Andromeda as a customer. Portsmouth became interested in his experience and recruited him, initially as a consultant. By 2017, Mehmood was describing his work as the company’s chief operating officer.

Mehmood explained that moving to the supplier’s side had changed how he approached requests. He wanted to understand the reasoning behind them. His experience of running a restaurant remained useful, while working inside a software company exposed the difficulties of building what customers asked for. Portsmouth had brought both perspectives into the same conversation.

The arithmetic of coming back

Portsmouth’s writing keeps returning to the customer who orders again. In a 2022 article, he constructed two imaginary pizza delivery businesses to challenge the reflex of asking for more orders. The distinction was how each business served customers, planned delivery and encouraged people to return.

They were teaching examples, rather than a report of two named restaurants. That distinction matters. He was using the familiar shape of a takeaway’s working week to make a management problem visible: a rush of demand can be disappointing if the operation cannot fulfil it well enough to earn another visit.

His later writing on retention asks operators to look at customers who have stopped ordering and what the restaurant is doing to bring them back. It is an unglamorous question, which may be why it is useful. A new order announces itself. Someone quietly choosing another restaurant is harder to notice.

In another illustrative calculation, he starts with 5,000 customers, a £30 order and one extra purchase per customer in a year. Multiplication produces £150,000 in additional sales. The example is conditional arithmetic, with no promise that a restaurant can summon the extra purchases simply by opening a dashboard.

The practical question sits underneath the sum. Does the operator know who its customers are, what they bought and when they last ordered? Portsmouth wants that information available to the restaurant. Otherwise, the relationship can become difficult to understand just when the restaurant needs to maintain it.

His concern with timing is similarly specific. A delivery taking 45 minutes could have been delayed in the kitchen, at the pass or on the road. Each possibility calls for a different response. A single elapsed time can tell the manager that something happened without revealing where to intervene.

In his writing on operational numbers, he argues for information that is quick to see and act on. The appeal is easy to understand from his earlier jobs. A manager needs to identify the obstruction while there is still time to do something about it. The report has to reach the person making the decision.

There is a broader consequence to that way of thinking. Buying software means deciding what the business wants to see clearly. A screen crowded with totals can leave an operator with more to read and little sense of where to start. Portsmouth’s emphasis on separating stages makes the information a way into a conversation: which part of this journey needs attention, and who can change it?

Learning to press publish

For someone willing to offer a firm opinion about restaurant operations, Portsmouth has described an unexpectedly hesitant start on LinkedIn. He had an account, read other people’s posts and preferred to remain invisible. Then he decided to contribute. Even after beginning, he wrote, pressing the post button still made him cringe.

That detail is more revealing than a polished claim to being naturally outspoken. Knowing a trade and being comfortable discussing it in public are separate things. His posts gave the founder a way to turn working observations into conversations, with restaurant people able to reply.

He has also argued for remaining involved in the company. In a public post, he described attempts to step back and his dissatisfaction with the results. His position is personal: he believes his continuing presence helps the business. It is consistent with the attachment in his account of starting at home.

The company’s April 2026 delivery profitability playbook places him in operational and commercial reviews of major accounts. His current responsibilities also include strategy, product direction and key accounts. These are roles that keep a founder near both the choices about what to build and the people expected to use it.

Andromeda now describes a team spread across the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Vietnam and the Philippines. Its work has moved from earlier Windows-based point-of-sale software to a cloud platform. Portsmouth’s continuing involvement connects that technical change with the operating questions that brought him into the business.

Those responsibilities also make the customer relationship part of the founder’s daily work, rather than something preserved only in the company’s origin story. It gives his career a continuity that the change from delivery driver to software executive might otherwise conceal. The person paying for the system still has to get through service. That is a useful audience to keep within reach when deciding what deserves attention next.

Room for a hello

The company’s product philosophy includes a test Portsmouth knows from experience: would a busy operator use this during Friday-night service? It is a sensible moment to choose. Anyone can appear helpful during a demonstration. Being helpful when someone has three other things to do requires a more economical performance.

His public argument for restaurant independence follows the same practical line. He wants operators to develop their own delivery channels and customer relationships. The ambition is to give them more influence over the business they are building, including the repeat trade that occupies so much of his attention.

Yet his view of hospitality extends beyond the transaction. He has written about wanting to recover an older, local feeling: people talking, recognising one another, saying hello. In his imagined example, a pizzeria owner delivers the food personally, with a smile. It is an affectionate picture from someone whose professional life deals with systems.

It also gives the technology a clear purpose. The food still has to reach somebody. The person receiving it will remember the experience, and may decide to order again. Portsmouth’s summer job became a company, but the human encounter at the end of the journey remains familiar. A door opens. Someone has brought dinner.