‘My eureka moment’

FIVE minutes into the interview and we’re on the move from a corner of the busy Newcastle office of software company Pebbles to a quieter meeting room on the floor below. This is, perhaps, only to be expected from a woman who’s moved 27 times in 30 years across four continents.

Along the way Janis Green has married, had a family and been one of the few women working in computers in the early days of new technology.

Now she’s changing her name, or rather the name of her company SF Software to the snappier Pebbles.

“We’ve been known by our product more than anything else and the name SF Software is as tedious and boring as you can get,” she says.

The SF stands for School Fund in a business that blends her experience of teaching, finance and computers.

The company designs software to help schools manage the school fund, voluntary fund or private fund, as it’s known in different parts of the country.

It’s the money schools receive from parents via students to pay for all the extras.

Back in this country after years of living abroad, the former Blaydon Grammar School girl was working for a group in Bedfordshire when she decided to apply her computer experience to school funds.

“That was the eureka moment when I thought ‘I can do this better’,”

she says. “I know accounts and have knowledge of IT which at the time was a fairly unusual position to be in.

I could put together all my skills,” she says.

Pebbles now supplies the software to 3,000 schools, helping to manage huge amounts of cash in schools from Cornwall to Scotland. Successful enough, you might think, but she points out there are another 22,000 schools to go.

“I’ve taken a fairly small, but viable company run with just two or three people into a fully grown-up company with ten staff and plans to go much further,” says Green.

“As a market, we have a long way to go. We went international when we sold to Dubai. The ethos of our company is that we’re there to assist. You can apply that to any market. I just happen to believe in schools, having been a teacher in my first life.”

With a name change comes expansion with a new service designed to help schools make the most of the difficult- to-locate European funding on offer. “We sift through all that information and pass to schools the ones for which they’re eligible,” she says.

“Having found the money, there’s the whole thing about gift aid. We’ve developed a module to show them how to claim back so much.

“It’s the whole life cycle as to how schools can get money for themselves, which is increasingly a requirement.

No one else is doing the whole package.”

Green has been back in the North- East since 2005, having spent much of her adult life abroad, from the hot desert of Zambia to frozen snow-covered Canada.

Her globe-trotting resulted from her father’s job. He was an engineer, who first went abroad when the government in Ghana requested assistance on a major irrigation project.

“Because it’s your parents, you don’t think about it. It’s only when you think about it afterwards you realise your mother must have been one of the bravest people on the planet,”

says Green.

Her mother left the family home in Peterlee with her daughters, fiveyear- old Janis and her younger sister, to join her husband in Africa.

‘HEATHROW could still probably have been classified as a Nissen hut. I remember the flight because she bought us special outfits that matched. You went from London to Frankfurt to Rome to Tunis or Algiers. It used to take a day and a bit to get there.”

She didn’t return home for some time. “I say that I’m a Geordie from Africa,” she jokes.

“My mother started a school so she could educate us. She was a very resourceful lady. With the help of the army, she built a wooden structure for the school.”

On average, Green moved every two years. When she married at 25, the travelling didn’t stop. “I just happened to meet somebody who’d been brought up in the same way, hauled across to the Middle East at an early age. That’s what we did, we upped sticks and moved at the drop of a hat.

“The family home was wherever my father was, it was the way my mother preferred it.”

Green was partly educated in England, where her grandmother still lived in the North-East. She recalls the “lollipop flights”, packed with schoolchildren going back to England for the holidays. They had to travel in school uniform.

By the time she married engineer Michael in Zambia, she was teaching.

Eventually she returned to the North- East with the intention of settling there. She didn’t last a year before getting itchy feet again.

Knowing they wanted to start a family and Africa wasn’t perhaps the best place to do it, they moved to Canada and the cold of Northern Alberta.

Their three sons were born there.

From one extreme to another, they next settled in Qatar in the Middle East where Michael worked for a national oil corporation. IT was being introduced into his working environment, so she found out about it first hand. “He took to it like the proverbial duck to water, bought a kit, built a computer and we learnt together. I found it quite fascinating.

“In between having children, I worked with a friend to do tax returns systems. When we got back in the late Eighties, the government had just announced the local management of schools initiative and were throwing money at schools to buy computers to do accounts.”

A few months after her return, she was working for a county council “because I was a teacher who knew about computers”.

She feels that Pebbles still has a lot to offer in the future. “I said two years ago I would like to double in size. I thought that would be huge. We’re there now and it’s nowhere near huge.

It’s limitless really and I’ve set myself no ceiling.

“If we can roll this out into other markets because there are things like churches, charities and other associations that could use the system.”

And she adds: “Then there’s the whole of the English-speaking world.” It sounds like she might be on the move again.