Frank Tindle · IT, Facilities & Operations
Thirty-one years running IT, security, buildings and procurement for businesses that are changing shape. Grow fast enough, or shrink fast enough, and your operation becomes the thing holding you back. I stop that happening.
Available now Interim · Fractional · The right permanent role
Supermassive Games Ltd · Electronic Arts Inc · Criterion Software Ltd (Games and RenderWare) · Acclaim Entertainment Inc – Iguana Entertainment Ltd
Bring me in when
Folding the systems in is the easy half. The rest is people deciding whether to stay.
Five deals, both sides of the table. At Criterion, integrated MathEngine and took on the Derby studio. On the receiving end three times: Acclaim 1995 · EA 2004 · Nordisk 2022. Five sites, zero disruption to releases.
Headcount, sites and run rate coming down at once, handled directly and decently.
Three redundancy rounds in three years. 387 people at peak, 172 by the end of 2025, below 95 after the 2026 round. Service satisfaction at 96–100% with my team at its smallest.
Fit-outs to a fixed date, moves nobody loses a day to, landlords who don’t get the last word.
Three sites into one. 210+ people moved in a day. Dilapidations £195k against a £211k budget. Two fit-outs delivered to fixed dates.
Audit what is actually used, build the evidence, then negotiate. Every year for over a decade.
One renewal, $109k → $76k. About £80k of wrong kit found in a single £145k quote. Cleaning, catering and licences rebased as headcount fell.
A publisher, an acquirer or an insurer sends the questionnaire. Build the capability, not the paperwork.
Phishing click rate 0.7% against a Gartner benchmark of around 15%. A publisher’s 118-question assessment met to deadline.
A short list of dull jobs worth automating, and a human check before anything sends.
A weekly service report that builds itself from live ticket data. Drafted with Claude, benchmarked against HDI and Gartner.
In their words
“When we were looking for someone to head up IT in the early days of Supermassive Games, he was the first person I thought of.”
“He quietly builds a solid, secure platform for the people around him to work on.”
“The fact that he knows games inside and out was a bonus for us, but I believe Frank could keep any large organisation operating at peak efficiency, in any area of the tech business.”
An office move, an integration, a cost-out, a security review. Scoped, priced, with an end date.
Your IT or operations director, fractionally. For 30 to 400 people who’ve outgrown ad-hoc IT: run by whoever knows most, and nobody’s actual job.
Full-time while you hire, restructure or get through a deal. Available now.
For the right business. Half an hour on a call is usually enough to tell which of these fits.
Joined a 30-person work-for-hire studio as its only IT manager. Built the operational side from a standing start to a team of 16 - IT, workplace, facilities, physical and cyber security, events, procurement - and carried it to a multi-site group of 387, plus around 20 at partner sites in Kyiv and Lviv, 400+ people supported, and through acquisition. Along the way: three development sites stood up in Ukraine in five months and kept running through the 2022 invasion, and a whole console platform stood up from nothing in nine working days.
Then the industry turned. Sites consolidated, run rate cut, and two rounds of redundancy handled directly and decently, with a third in my final months. From a peak of 387 people: about 90 roles in 2024, 36 in 2025 leaving 172 by year end, then up to 75 in 2026, taking the studio below 95. The day after the first announcement I cleared the diary, sat down with every one of my direct reports, then told the CEO what they had actually said. My own function went from 16 to 9 over the same stretch, and service held at or above HDI and Gartner benchmarks throughout. Scaling down well is rarer than scaling up, and a good deal harder to do properly.
Two buildings, nobody losing a working day. One was a 17,000 sq ft fit-out to a fixed date, when the network supplier was quoting 99 to 150 days against a 76-day window. I bought refurbished, with warranties, on five-day lead times. Earlier, part of the leadership team on a 96,000 sq ft fit-out consolidating three EA sites into one.
March 2020: an office-only culture, no VPN and no spare laptops. Ninety per cent of the studio were working from home inside two weeks, every machine encrypted inside five. A full-site power cut on a Sunday, every desktop back by the evening. A cloud supplier that ceased trading at a few days’ notice, re-homed in five working days with no fees and the discount intact.
Most of this happened in games, which is a decent stress test: launch dates that don’t move, enormous data, IP that people actively try to steal. None of it is specific to games. A lease is a lease, and a software vendor will overcharge anybody.
Career
Next step
Tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help. Recruiters welcome - interim, fractional or permanent.