Hi Andy!
Andy has spent the best part of 30 years working with databases, which is a long time to spend getting other people’s data to behave itself!
In the summer of 2026 Andy joined Telescope as our new direct mail and database programmer, part of the data and direct mail capability we now run in-house, taking a client’s raw data all the way through to a finished, mailed campaign. It’s a job title that sounds a fair bit more mysterious than the actual work, so here’s what it means once you strip the jargon off it.
What does a direct mail and database programmer actually do?
A lot of the job is the steady, behind-the-scenes data processing that keeps clients’ campaigns running. That means handling orders, returns, address files and customer data, on a daily, weekly or monthly cycle depending on what each client needs. Some of it is about mailing lists. When a client wants to send something out, someone has to turn a big pile of raw data, addresses, postcodes, customer history, into a clean, usable file, with duplicates and the obvious wrong fits taken out, so the right thing reaches the right people rather than going straight in the recycling with the takeaway menus. It’s a team effort too, with Andy working alongside the rest of the data team to keep it all moving.
That’s the heart of it, but there’s a lot more underneath. Andy develops, manages and supports all the data-processing workflows behind Telescope Group’s direct mail work, everything from database development and address-data preparation to secure data handling, systems integration, campaign support and quality assurance. As he puts it, “you’re not just pulling a list of everybody, you’re working out who’s genuinely worth talking to, which is a lot fiddlier than it looks from the outside”.
Thirty years, starting with a first job most people would envy!
Andy studied IT at Leeds (Leeds Poly back then, Leeds Beckett University now), and the course happened to cover Oracle, which is still the biggest database software company in the world. The university had a link with Oracle the company, one thing led to another, and his very first job out of university ended up being with them, which is a bit like turning up to your first day of five-a-side and being handed a Premier League shirt.
From there he built up the kind of experience you only really get from doing the work properly over a long stretch. He spent around ten years in and around Kellogg’s in Manchester, keeping the supply chain ticking so the right ingredients turned up at the right factory at the right time (yes, there is a database quietly making sure the world has cornflakes). After that came eight years in utilities, wrestling gas and electricity meter data through the great smart-meter switchover and a deregulated market where information was forever pinging between different companies. Then a spell at Capita, supporting the systems behind some of the UK’s best-known call centres. Big names, big datasets, and in every case the quiet behind-the-scenes graft that everything else leans on.
GDPR
Ask Andy which work he’s proudest of and he points to GDPR. When the regulations came in, every company handling data had to change how they did it, and at Capita he was heavily involved in making sure it was done properly: nothing kept longer than it should be, the right to be forgotten built in for real, and live personal data scrubbed out of test systems that had no business hanging on to it, all without knocking over the systems that needed that data to keep running. It’s precise, high-stakes stuff, the sort of job where roughly right and actually right are miles apart.
Off the clock
Andy is, by his own cheerful admission, a serious music obsessive. He’s at a gig most weeks and has merrily spent a small fortune on records over the years, mostly rock and indie and anything with a bit of edge, so The Cure, Pixies and the Smiths all get plenty of airtime. He reckons that in another life he’d have made a decent music journalist at the NME, and having chatted to him about it, we’re inclined to agree.
He’s also a real ale man (more CAMRA than craft, and best not to get him going on fizzy grapefruit beer in a posh can), a devoted Rotherham United season ticket holder of more years than he’ll willingly own up to, and dad to a 15-year-old guitarist who is slowly but steadily dragging him towards the heavier end of the record shop, one Metallica riff at a time.
Why Telescope?
This is the part we like best. Andy had been working from home for a good few years and fancied getting back into a proper team with actual humans in it, so he looked us up, found this very “meet the team” page, and decided we seemed like the type of bunch he’d want to work with. Happily for us, he was right. He’s now a welcome addition to a growing data and direct mail team, and part of how we take clients the whole way from raw data to the doormat. Welcome aboard, Andy!