At S2F, the milestones just keep on coming! Following 10 years of Operations Director Jo Grainger, and our company’s 20th anniversary, it is the turn of Luke Seager, as he celebrates 10 years at S2F!
Luke joined S2F in May 2015, two years after graduating from Birmingham City University. As the company “web head”, his initial role as a Web Developer covered all things technical, with much of his time spent coding and designing websites. As the years passed, he formed a team with Cameron in 2021, with Luke taking the role as Team Leader and managing all aspects of web development (just don’t call them “the IT team” – they don’t like that!).
With a cool head, and a level of calmness that is to be admired, Luke brings a warmth to the team and can always be relied on not just by his colleagues, but all S2F’s customers if they have any technical queries.
Internally, he is also responsible for developing our S2F Central system, which allows each team member to have a clear vision over their tasks for each month, making the lives of our Account Managers much more straightforward!
As we celebrate his 10th anniversary at S2F, we sat down with Luke to look back on the last decade, his inspirations, and what he sees for the future of marketing.
It feels good! It doesn’t feel like 10 years at all – it’s gone in the blink of an eye!
I think if you enjoy what you do, then you’re obviously in the right place, and I’m definitely still enjoying my time at S2F, 10 years on. It’s a really good feeling!
It’s changed massively – it was at least half the size it is now. We had a smaller setup in a smaller office, essentially with only one person per role.
It was such an interesting time when I first joined, as we had just started working with Arrow Solutions – who are still one of our clients to this day! One of the first things I did was go with the S2F team to visit Arrow at their headquarters, so within the first couple of weeks I was in the boardroom of our new client, and I was really keen to impress.
Coming into S2F, I had to adapt as I had previously run my own agency with a business partner, so I had to learn the ropes again. It was a very different experience going from handling everything to being in the sole role of Web Developer, but I like being thrown in at the deep end – I think it’s a good way of learning!
When I started, Richard Hill was the only in-house developer at S2F, so he took me under his wing. We looked at how S2F was building websites, and I learned Rich’s way – over time we moulded all of what we learned from each other and put it into effective web development processes. We were constantly looking at new technologies, new platforms, and new ways of doing things.
WordPress was evolving at the time, and we kept up to date with that while pushing it to do more for our clients, adding extra features and functionalities. So, over my first two or three years, Rich and I worked together on all that. Once we got to the point where we were efficient enough, all web work was then handled by me, freeing Rich up to focus on design.
My journey was a bit odd! At secondary school, my favourite lesson was Film & TV, and that made me want to take on Media Studies at college. This involved a lot of different things, including film, TV and music, but learning about print design is what stood out the most to me. From there, I wanted to work for a magazine and do print design work, so the web wasn’t even on my radar!
However, at university, I enrolled on quite a broad media course, which along with video, photography and graphic design, also featured web development. Once I started learning about the latter, I picked it up quite quickly and really enjoyed it!
I love the web, because it involves all the stuff I enjoyed from print design, along with all the technical aspects of coding. I’ve always loved starting with a blank canvas and then finishing with something that’s useful – something that helps someone, or fixes a problem.
Obviously, coming from the generation I am, and having two older brothers, I grew up with a desktop computer using Windows 95, so I remember using computers from an early age. I was always a “techy” kid, even being my dad’s tech support if ever he had a query about the computer. And now, here I am!
I relish the challenge – it’s something that’s new to me. Before Cameron joined, I’d never had to manage or mentor anyone before, so it was quite a daunting task. He was young and full of beans, so it was my responsibility to mould him into the team.
Sometimes I would wonder “am I going to be a good teacher?”, but after putting a plan and proper training document together, we worked our way through it and I started to gain more confidence.
Now, it’s a really nice feeling that I can trust Cameron to deliver a website. When he first came in, he had no experience in web development, so he has come really far in the last four years. If I’m on annual leave, he gets given a lot more responsibility and the feedback from the team has always been brilliant!
Jump in and say “yes” to everything! I think you should learn by doing, and if you jump in and start saying “yes”, you will push yourself further than you can ever imagine.
At the moment, it’s hard to predict with AI being in its infancy. From a web development point of view, AI helps massively, but it will be interesting to see how dependent the industry becomes on it. As a human, you still need to problem solve, which is where AI falls short, so humans are needed to steer the ship.
With everything becoming more and more digital, I can only see that trend continuing. Someday I even hope that we can have an S2F AI that’s trained on all clients’ data, helping us to produce perfectly branded content for each of our customers. It will free us up so we can think more creatively, and we wouldn’t need to worry much about the technical side that AI would manage. There are infinite possibilities!
I’ll have to go with “where’s the time gone?!”
It has absolutely flown by! It doesn’t feel like 10 years at all.
Thank you to Luke for all his contributions and achievements so far! It is wonderful to see how much this young man has grown since walking through the doors in 2015 – he is truly a huge asset to the business and we don’t know where we would be without him!
Congratulations Luke – thank you for all that you do!
If you want to see more from S2F, you can learn more about our team on our website, and you can follow us on LinkedIn.