Operational systems
Bookings, access, membership, finance and reporting for businesses that had outgrown spreadsheets and disconnected tools.
About Megabite
Twenty years on all three sides of the same problem.
You deal with Thomas Barrie, and he stays accountable for the outcome. There is a team behind the work — what there is not is an account-management layer between you and the person answerable for it.
The short version
Enquiries taken, enquiries generated, systems built.
Most people who build lead and automation systems have only ever seen the software side. Thomas has spent time on each of the three positions that matter: taking the enquiries, generating them, and building the systems that decide what happens to them.
That order is not an accident of a scattered CV. It is why the questions asked on a first call tend to be about your process rather than your technology stack.
Where it started
Answering the phone in an estate agency.
Halifax Estate Agents, Leeds. Two years on the front line of property enquiries.
Valuation requests, viewing bookings, applicants and vendors. The job was answering the phone, qualifying the caller and getting an appointment into a diary — the exact workflow Megabite now automates for estate agencies.
It is also where the commercial reality of a missed call stops being a statistic. An unanswered phone at half past five was a valuation somebody else did.
- Valuation and viewing enquiries, taken live
- Qualifying vendors, buyers and applicants
- Booking into valuers’ diaries
- Following up what did not convert
Then finance
Four years in residential property investment.
HBOS Group PLC, following the Halifax merger — and a first exposure to process at genuine scale.
Regulated financial services runs on defined process, auditable decisions and consistency between people. Nothing is left to whoever happens to be handling it. That is an unusual grounding for someone who later builds automation, because it sets the standard for what a workflow has to be able to prove about itself.
The habits that come from it show up in the work: confidence thresholds, human review on anything with a commercial consequence, and a logged record of who decided what. Those are not features added to sound rigorous. They are what a regulated environment teaches you to build in from the start.
- Residential property investment, HBOS Group PLC
- Process design in a regulated environment
- Auditable decisions and consistent handling
- Scale, and what breaks at scale
Then the other side of the enquiry
Generating the leads, not just answering them.
Following the Lloyds takeover of HBOS, a move into digital marketing and technology across two companies under the same owner.
At The Media Buzz, email marketing and lead generation. At IMJACK PLC, education software. The first of those is the piece that matters most to what Megabite does now.
Spending years generating leads teaches you something uncomfortable: how much of what you produce is wasted at the other end. Campaigns that worked, delivering enquiries into businesses that answered them two days later, or not at all. The research on response time is a formalisation of something that is obvious to anyone who has watched good leads die in an inbox.
That is the origin of the AI receptionist as the flagship service. It is not a product looking for a problem. It is the problem seen from the generating end, then fixed from the receiving end.
- Email marketing and lead generation specialist
- Campaign delivery and conversion tracking
- Education software product work
- Where generated demand actually gets lost
And since
Ten years building the systems.
Independent consulting and development, with the last three to four years concentrated on AI and automation.
Products, not prototypes
Native and web applications taken through design, build, deployment and the unglamorous years of maintenance afterwards.
Integration work
Connecting CRM, booking, finance and communication systems where the handover between them was the actual failure.
Applied AI
Voice agents, qualification and document handling inside controlled workflows, with escalation routes and logging built around them.
Sectors
Hospitality, finance and real estate.
Depth in three sectors rather than a claim to all of them. Each one contributes something specific to how the work gets built.
From the inside
Two years taking property enquiries at Halifax Estate Agents, then four in residential property investment.
- What a valuer’s diary actually looks like, and why double-booking one is expensive
- The difference between a vendor, an applicant and a time-waster, in the first ninety seconds
- Why the enquiry at half past five is worth more than the one at eleven
- How an applicant register decays if nobody works it
Process that has to hold up
Four years in residential property investment at HBOS Group PLC — process at scale, in a regulated environment.
- Decisions that have to be auditable after the fact, not just correct at the time
- Consistency between people as a requirement rather than an aspiration
- Approval thresholds, delegation and what happens when the approver is away
- Why confidence thresholds and logging belong in the build, not the roadmap
Live conditions
Venue and event operations, where the system has to work at the door on a Saturday night.
- Offline-first, because the connectivity at the door will fail at some point
- Staff who have thirty seconds to learn it and no time to read a manual
- Peak load arriving in a twenty-minute window rather than spread across a day
- No maintenance window — it either works during service or it has failed
How the work is delivered
One point of accountability, a team behind it.
You are not handed to an account manager, and you are not relying on one person’s availability either.
Who you actually deal with
- One relationship, start to finish. The person who scopes the work is the person answerable for it being right.
- Specialists brought in where they add something. Development, integration and design capacity sits behind the engagement rather than in front of it.
- No handover to a delivery team you never met. What was agreed on the call is what gets built, because the same person carries it through.
- Continuity and documentation as standard. The systems are documented and handed over properly, so nothing depends on any one individual staying available.
- Direct lines. When something needs attention there is no ticket queue and no account manager to go through.
What we do not do
- We do not sell the expensive answer to a cheap problem. If configuring what you already own solves it, that is the recommendation.
- We do not claim every technology. Depth in specific sectors and a defined stack, rather than a capability list covering everything.
- We do not build on unreliable data. If the records are not good enough to act on, fixing that is the actual project.
- We do not automate a disputed process. If two people would handle the same case differently, no software settles the argument.
- We do not proceed when the numbers do not work. Engagements do end at “not worth doing”, which is what the free first conversation is for.
Where and how
Based in Mallorca, working across the UK and Spain.
Remote by default, on site where the work genuinely needs it.
Where we work
Working with businesses across the United Kingdom, Spain and wider Europe, from a base in Mallorca.
Direct lines
+44 20 7078 8666 in the UK and +34 621 082 806 in Spain. Both are direct lines, not a switchboard.
How engagements start
A free twenty-minute conversation about the specific constraint. Not a demonstration, and not a pitch. See AI consulting services for how work is structured and priced.
Speak to the person who does the work
Bring the constraint, not the brief.
The first conversation is about what is actually slowing the business down — where enquiries go, what gets rekeyed, what depends on somebody remembering. If there is no worthwhile intervention, you will hear that on the call rather than in a proposal.
Free, about twenty minutes, and it is me on the other end.