Meet the team: JAM-IT's co-owner Armando

In this blog series we introduce our people to you. Today we tell you about the person it all started with: Armando.

A little over five years ago he set out on a big adventure: JAM-IT. Starting a company and growing it comes with plenty of ups and downs. You learn to make mistakes, recognise them and carry on.

By now Armando has experience with every facet of the business. Curious how it all began and how he grew JAM-IT into what it is today? Read on.

From psychology to IT

What do you think of when you think of IT? Perhaps laptops or PCs? Automating or securing? And what kind of people do you picture? The funny thing is that Armando has no technical background at all.

He studied applied cognitive psychology, a course about how the brain deals with different situations, data and stimuli. Even so, it overlaps with IT: thanks to his studies, Armando knows better than anyone how to set up an application so it is user-friendly.

After his studies he was able to start at a large IT company. There he learned to develop applications for the financial sector and government bodies. Armando enjoyed the work straight away. It did not take long before he had mastered the technical and analytical skills.

If I did not have a passion for my work, I could not do this

In that role he also came into contact with low-code programming for the first time. Because Armando is naturally curious, he always wants to get to the bottom of things. He never stops learning, and that perspective always gives him something to look forward to. When he is working it does not feel like "work" to him, but like solving a puzzle. That is how his passion for IT came about.

Besides programming, Armando loves motorcycling, fitness and playing guitar. IT is and remains his passion, always somewhere in the back of his mind. When he works on a complex IT problem during the day, he can suddenly wake up at night with the solution. That happens regularly.

The start

At his last employer Armando worked with Netvice, the company that would become his first client. They were so pleased with his work that they asked him to take on a first project. Armando immediately chose to work with Mendix, one of the largest low-code platforms in the Netherlands. He brought in his colleagues Jos and Martijn and together they formed JAM-IT.

I was still missing an übernerd, a technical guy

At the time the three of them worked part-time, but in early 2016 the company grew so fast that Martijn and Armando left their old jobs. Jos decided to take a different direction, so the two of them continued with JAM-IT full-time.

Plastic chairs

In the beginning Armando and Martijn worked at Martijn's kitchen table. As the number of assignments grew, so did JAM-IT's ambitions and goals. So they opened their own office. First furnished with plastic chairs and desks made of boxes, later with real furniture. In the summer of 2017, a year later, the first employee joined.

Since then JAM-IT has grown enormously, not only in the number of clients and assignments, but also in professionalism. They place great value on standardising and automating, and you can see that in their efficient way of working. The team has grown too: with a marketing/HR employee, an office manager/bookkeeper, three developers and a steady network of freelancers, the office keeps getting livelier.

Role in the team

Within the team Armando has seen every role and task, from client contact and cold calling to product development. Now he increasingly has a supporting and strategic role. Together with Martijn he looks at developments in the market and tries to respond to them.

If you treat me as though I know nothing, I can be sure you will tell me everything

He calls himself a real IT person, but also someone who goes very much on feeling. He puts his heart and soul into his work, and tries to pass that on to his team. In the past that feeling sometimes got in the way: he was not critical enough towards his team, or he found it hard to delegate. By now he senses exactly what his team needs and which candidate fits the JAM-IT mindset well.

Successes

Over the past few years Armando has been able to celebrate many successes with JAM-IT. He obtained the Mendix Expert Developer certificate, the highest attainable within Mendix and one that few in the Netherlands hold. But he is at least as proud of his employee who obtained the Advanced Developer certificate. And every time a project is completed successfully, it feels like a new victory.

It really is a kick to see our team grow in knowledge and experience! They come up with solutions I would never have thought of myself

For himself he has the mission to learn something every day and to deliver something every day. Even if it is something small: every step forward counts.

The future

Over the coming years Armando would like to keep growing with JAM-IT. He wants to develop more of their own products and scale up the quality of their work even further. That way the team can offer their clients the best solution.