Sam Booth and the business of switching off

Sam Booth announced the sale of his business before he had sold his business. In April 2017, a few months into running Just After Midnight, he began an update with the familiar fantasy of the founder who makes a fortune almost immediately. Then came the acquisition announcement. Then the punchline: “yeah, not really.” The eventual buyer would have to wait another four years.

It was a useful introduction to Booth. Here was somebody trying to build a serious company while retaining the right to laugh at the ceremonial language of entrepreneurship. He compared being a CEO to whack-a-mole. Sorting out one problem seemed chiefly to make room for the next. Meanwhile, the company was doing something deliberately unglamorous: keeping other people’s websites working when their offices had emptied.

The question that followed him home

Before he founded JAM, Booth spent more than a decade in senior digital agency roles across EMEA and Asia Pacific. He knew the commercial side of building platforms and applications. He also knew the awkward question waiting near the end of a pitch: what happens when this thing goes down after hours?

The answers could be rather makeshift. A hosting provider might cover part of the problem. A developer might be given a phone to keep nearby overnight. An agency might quote such an intimidating price for support that the customer politely abandoned the subject. Booth had encountered these arrangements from inside the agency business. The gap between selling an application and taking responsibility for its continued operation became his opening.

By October 2016, he had launched Just After Midnight. The name carried the sales pitch in four words. The initial offer let agencies sell round-the-clock server and application support under their own brands, without building the whole operation themselves. London and Singapore gave the young company its first international footing. Sitecore and Adobe platforms were early specialisms.

Booth had wanted his own business since his teenage years. Leaving a comfortable salary took longer. In announcing the launch, he acknowledged the attraction of a predictable career and the difficulty of stepping away from it. The service was an answer to a practical problem; starting it required a rather less tidy personal decision.

“I feel for the first time in a while, that I am learning again.”

Sam Booth, November 2016

Five jobs, one founder

Almost immediately, the founder’s job expanded into a collection of other people’s jobs. Finance, recruitment, sales and marketing all arrived at his desk. His early writing has the surprised appreciation of a former colleague discovering what the departments around him had actually been doing. Independence came with paperwork. Quite a lot of paperwork.

He described the slow machinery of opening bank accounts, getting documents certified and satisfying requirements for seemingly ordinary business services. The complaints were specific enough to be recognisable. A company could offer overnight technical help across borders while its founder still had to wrestle with forms. Modernity had arrived unevenly.

There was another discovery: conversations with prospective customers taught him things that financial models could not. Planning mattered, but getting on the phone exposed the offer to actual demand. His account of those first months gives generous credit to people who supplied advice, time and trust. The business began with a service to sell and a network willing to listen.

The customer changed the offer

JAM’s proposition did not remain exactly where Booth first put it. Customers wanted managed hosting alongside support. They wanted more help with application management and DevOps. By spring 2017, he was describing work the company had not originally planned to offer. The expansion followed requests coming through the door.

That adjustment had a practical logic. A team responsible for fixing applications learns a great deal about the environments that cause them trouble. Improving those environments makes the support job easier. The company could help configure cloud infrastructure as well as answer the alarm when something failed. Its daily responsibilities were teaching it what else to sell.

There were more prosaic changes, too. Booth discovered how willingly customers could let an invoice linger beyond its due date. JAM moved to taking fees by direct debit. It is a small detail in a technology company’s history, but a revealing one: making the service dependable also meant making the money arrive dependably.

A Sydney toast, with history attached

In September 2018, Booth announced JAM’s Australian expansion with a photograph taken in Sydney in 2015. He was on the right; Kris Croucher was on the left. The picture predated the announcement, but the friendship made it relevant. Croucher was taking the business into Australia from Sydney.

They had worked alongside each other for more than ten years. Croucher’s background included Reading Room, Adelphi Digital and Acquia. Booth put weight on that familiarity: shared values and an understanding of what the company was trying to deliver. International expansion was being built through a relationship with some mileage on it.

A month later, Booth’s second-birthday update supplied a different view of the company’s progress. He reported a team growing from ten to 25 and annual revenue growth just shy of 400%. He was writing from the Sydney office. New technical and incident management hires, a marketing function and security accreditations were giving the operation more substance.

His celebration came with resistance to the polished founder routine. He cheerfully disclaimed the dawn workout and the perfect pre-office ritual. The pleasure he described was seeing the company grow into its promises to clients and staff. There was room for ambition without pretending every morning began like an advertisement for ambition.

Who owns the problem?

By the company’s third birthday, Booth was thinking about fried chicken. A KFC advertisement filmed around Peckham Rye, where JAM had its headquarters, prompted a comparison between the original recipe and the imitators. He had noticed other businesses adopting versions of JAM’s model. Competition was evidence that the gap he had spotted was real.

Under the joke sat a precise commercial argument. A client with a broken website gains little from an infrastructure team blaming an application team, or the reverse. Booth wanted engineers and developers able to follow an incident across those boundaries. The customer needed somebody to own the problem through to a fix.

The idea explains why support became such a strong organising principle for the business. From the customer’s point of view, technical boundaries can be wonderfully irrelevant. A campaign is running, a site is failing, and an explanation of departmental responsibility will not restore it. JAM was selling the willingness and ability to keep investigating.

The exit eventually became real

In December 2020, Booth sat down with business coach Dominic Monkhouse to discuss net promoter score. The question behind that conversation was how a growing company keeps paying attention to customers. An expanding operation needs ways of hearing whether its service still feels as good on the receiving end.

The following year brought an actual acquisition. Ultima Business Solutions bought JAM. The transaction covered the company’s entire issued share capital, with the sale described as worth multiple millions of pounds. Booth stayed to run it. The midnight-support business had acquired a larger corporate setting without immediately losing its founder from the daily operation.

There is a nicely appropriate detail in the transaction: the lawyers at Bates Wells were instructed only eleven days before completion. Even the sale involved a deadline requiring somebody to pick up the work and finish it. Booth praised the clarity and focus of their advice. This time, his acquisition announcement needed no comic retraction.

Leaving the lights with somebody else

In April 2024, Booth stepped down as JAM’s CEO. He said he would remain a shareholder and board director of the wider group, while leaving day-to-day operations. He thanked the people who had invested, worked, travelled and moved countries to make the company possible. Andromeda, his partner and marketing director, received particular credit for helping it get started and keep going.

His proposed retirement activities had a familiar comic qualification. There might be new hobbies. He would try to avoid becoming the inevitable coach, author or mentor. He also admitted that he expected to start another company. By September, that possibility had a name.

The second album has an off switch

Turn It Off grew from a different frustration with cloud computing: infrastructure that keeps running when nobody needs it. Booth presented the new venture with Andromeda Booth, Kris Croucher and Jonathan von Abo. Familiar collaborators were back, addressing the cost of leaving things on.

In his September 2024 interview, he described a developer-focused platform that could stop idle environments and let users bring applications back when needed. His argument concerned incentives as much as technology. Developers are rewarded for shipping useful features; reducing the bill for forgotten resources can fall between everybody’s priorities.

He called the new venture his “Tricky Second Album”. The phrase suited somebody who had already spent years puncturing the grand language of company building. JAM had answered the question of who would be there after midnight. Turn It Off asked whether every environment needed to be there with them. Booth had found another ordinary operational irritation worth taking seriously.