Meet The Team

Geoff Ley

Managing Director and Founder

Com­ing from a fam­i­ly farm­ing back­ground in North Devon, Geoff spent his ear­ly career devel­op­ing stock con­trol sys­tems for cor­po­ra­tions across Europe before iden­ti­fy­ing an open­ing in the grow­ing small busi­ness soft­ware indus­try for straight­for­ward pro­grams to take care of farm records and thus SUM-IT was born in the ear­ly 1980s.

With a ful­ly hands-on approach and a clear vision of how soft­ware can be designed to ensure the steps in any process are kept to a min­i­mum, Geoff enjoys grow­ing SUM-IT and its team into the suc­cess­ful com­pa­ny it is today.

Ben John

Sales & Marketing Director

Ben grew up on farms across south­ern Eng­land and after an ear­ly brush with fish farm­ing fol­lowed by sev­er­al years of farm­ing over­seas he returned to the UK, keen to grow his career with­in the agri­cul­tur­al indus­try. He joined SUM-IT in 1987 as it was begin­ning to make its mark across the coun­try.

Ben man­ages all the sales and mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties at SUM-IT and you’ll prob­a­bly bump into him on the SUM-IT stand at one of the many events and shows we attend each year.

Gordon Fowler

Software Support, Training & Testing

Gor­don was born and bred a farmer’s son, grow­ing up in North Buck­ing­hamshire, and on fin­ish­ing agri­cul­tur­al col­lege in 1989 he then joined SUM-IT. Since then he has become the main­stay in SUM-IT’s Soft­ware Sup­port and Train­ing ser­vices in the Thame office, with an in-depth under­stand­ing of farm account­ing and a deep knowl­edge of how to get the most out of the Total soft­ware.

His oth­er role is ensur­ing that each new quar­ter­ly release of Total is put through a com­pre­hen­sive test­ing régime pri­or to it being let loose on the thou­sands of SUM-IT Users and he has thor­ough­ly trained the test­ing team in root­ing out the wily bugs that can some­times crop up.

Alex Herbert

Development Manager

Alex was born a town­ie but dur­ing his teenage years spent most of his hol­i­days work­ing on a farm near his grand­par­ents. He went on to study Agri­cul­ture at Not­ting­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and then enhanced his IT skills with an MSc in Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment at Lan­cast­er Uni­ver­si­ty. Alex joined SUM-IT in 1996 as part of the Soft­ware Sup­port team and after 3 years learn­ing all about the client base and exist­ing prod­uct range he start­ed devel­op­ing the cur­rent range of Total soft­ware.

Alex took charge of the Devel­op­ment team in 2001 which is now based near Durham. His keen eye for detail and log­i­cal plan­ning can be seen through­out our prod­uct range.

Andrew MacLennan

Year-End Consultant

Hav­ing held the Main Sup­port post for many years Andrew has main­ly retired but still likes to keep his hand in by assist­ing SUM-IT clients in mak­ing sure their Total Accounts Data is updat­ed with any Year-End Adjust­ments, keep­ing the fig­ures all aligned with what their accoun­tan­t’s Final Accounts reflect.

Chris Swankie

Hardware & Networks Support

With a back­ground in IT sup­port and full Microsoft Net­works cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to his name, Chris joined SUM-IT with a lot of use­ful skills and now runs all the hard­ware prepa­ra­tion and net­work instal­la­tions as well as becom­ing a good author­i­ty on the Total soft­ware as part of the Sup­port team.

Sean Dobson

Software Support

A cheer­ful voice on the Sup­port hot­line, Sean’s laid back tem­pera­ment is well-suit­ed to grow­ing User con­fi­dence when explain­ing solu­tions to their queries. Read­ing between the lines of their ini­tial expla­na­tion is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing the cause behind their prob­lem and Sean quick­ly iden­ti­fies where their real issue lies and resolves it, usu­al­ly painlessly.

Robert Padginton

Admin Support

Robert is everyone’s assis­tant in our office as he enables each of us to keep focused on tasks at hand by tak­ing care of all the back­ground jobs. Whether it’s dis­patch­ing new hard­ware, cut­ting new pro­gram CDs, keep­ing on top of GDPR com­pli­ance and much more – he’s cer­tain­ly a man with many hats and always a big smile.

Michael Champion

Senior Software Developer

Michael is ensur­ing SUM-IT’s soft­ware embraces the very lat­est tech­nolo­gies. Lead­ing the devel­op­ment of our next gen­er­a­tion of man­age­ment soft­ware, he is putting his sea­soned pro­gram­ming skills to good effect. At the core of all SUM-IT pro­grams is their prac­ti­cal sim­plic­i­ty and Michael is tak­ing that for­ward with the new TOTAL2 sys­tem incor­po­rat­ing user-friend­ly screens around state-of-the-art archi­tec­ture, car­ry­ing on the lega­cy that has been the cor­ner­stone of our inte­grat­ed Total soft­ware since 2001.

Caitlyn Lambert

Sales, Marketing & Support

From a farm­ing back­ground in York­shire and gain­ing a First in Agri-Busi­ness Man­age­ment from New­cas­tle Uni­ver­si­ty, Cait­lyn has rapid­ly proved her abil­i­ties in both the Sup­port and Mar­ket­ing teams, gath­er­ing a sound under­stand­ing of the soft­ware to assist all users whilst impor­tant­ly pro­vid­ing a youth­ful eye to our pro­mo­tions online, man­ag­ing the web­site and our social media presence.

Demari Moore

Software Developer

Demari is a key mem­ber of the SUM-IT Devel­op­ment team as he uses his graph­ics back­ground to design clean screen lay­outs and clear reports. He also has a keen atten­tion to detail when it comes to build­ing inten­sive back­ground soft­ware engines.

Steph Ley

Admin & Marketing

Alex Jefferies

Software Support

Alex joined us in 2022. He works with the devel­op­ment team to bug test our new soft­ware and pro­vide a smooth tran­si­tion for users from Total to TOTAL2. He is an engi­neer­ing grad­u­ate who is enjoy­ing learn­ing the ins and out of the ever chang­ing farm­ing industry.