With over 33 years of experience founding and running businesses, Richard understands what it means to rely on a system when something goes wrong at 6pm on a Friday.
He knows what happens when a tool that looked impressive in a demo creates more work than it saves. He has lived the difference between software built to satisfy a brief and software built to actually solve a problem. That distinction is everything. And it is rare.
Ai9 was built from the ground up by someone who has spent three decades making operational decisions, managing people, navigating client relationships, and building businesses that had to work in the real world — not just on paper. Richard holds MARLA and MNAEA qualifications and founded Spencer Harvey, one of his three active companies, alongside Worldwide VA, which was built almost entirely on referral.
That last point matters. Referral-driven growth does not happen by accident. It is the result of consistently delivering on commitments and treating every client relationship as long-term.
When Richard assesses a build at Ai9, the first questions are not technical. They are business ones. Will this actually be used? Does it solve the right problem, or just the obvious one? Will it create friction somewhere else in the operation? Is this something a business genuinely needs, or something a developer thought would be interesting to build?
Those are the questions senior leaders ask. They are the questions Richard has been asking for over three decades — and they are now baked into how every Ai9 project is scoped, built, and delivered.
It is worth knowing who you are dealing with beyond the business. None of this is incidental — it reflects someone who commits properly to things, makes decisions and acts on them, and does not mistake being busy for making progress. The same clarity runs through everything Ai9 builds.
Richard took a three-month sabbatical to travel with no fixed agenda rouai9y twelve years ago — at a point when most people in his position would not have considered it. He did it anyway. If you have been let down by technology that was technically correct but practically useless, you will understand immediately why that kind of decision-making matters.
