We sat down with Steven Smith to get his unfiltered take on everything from the daily realities of running a tech company to the future of AI in business. His insights are refreshingly honest and packed with the kind of practical wisdom that only comes from years at the coalface of business integration.
What does a typical day look like in your role?
“Make a list of my priorities for the day ahead. These are usually grouped into 4 main headings of Strategy, Sales, Project Management and Finance. Then I open my email and Slack and instantly start riding the bucking bronco for 8 or 9 hours before stopping for dinner. If i have any energy left after dinner i’ll pick the laptop up while the bronco sleeps and tend to the list of priorities i made at the start of the day. On a good day/evening i might get 40% of my list done. The rest roles over to the next day.
Eat. Sleep. Bronco. Repeat”
What’s one major shift you’re seeing in how businesses approach software, integration, or automation?
“Biggest trend i’m seeing right now is in the growth of Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS). I see a lot of YouTubers demonstrating how ‘easy’ it is for businesses to build their own automations using these codeless platforms and even linking in AI Agents to gnerate incredible results.”
What do you think is the biggest misconception about APIs, automation, or integrations?
“The trouble with this ‘No Code’ or ‘Lo Code’ trend is that these YouTubers must spend days building an automation with lots of trial and error, then edit their video down to 20 minutes and make it look so easy.
It’s like they’re showing you the answers to a Maths exam, but without any of the working out, so it’s unclear how they got to the answer. Feels like a con.
There is so much work that goes into understanding a business and it’s current processes and pain points before you can start to design any kind of automation. That’s before you start building, testing, implementing and supporting that automation.”
Where do you see real value in AI – and where do you think it’s just hype?
“As a software company we’re are continuously evaluating the AI landscape and testing how we can embrace AI to improve and productivity and the quality of our sofwtare products at the same time. What we’ve found so far is that AI coding tools need a lot of supervision and when you give them too big a task, they start to forget the original brief when their only part way through or they lose context. I would describe it as employing a super intelligent software developer with amnesia. The hype is playing on every business owner’s FOMO, mine included and that why we’re leaning in to it.”
Tell us about a recent project or challenge you worked on that made a clear impact for a client.
“One of our best automation success stories is a project we did for a drop shipper of music industry merchandise. They were spending a week each month painstakingly generating the sales invoices and associated breakdowns of transactions for tens of thousands of orders they process each month for hundreds of customers.
Now they’re monthly invoicing is processed and sent to their customers on the 1st of the month. It takes our automation around 5 minutes to complete a week’s worth of human effort. Now they just check a few invoices to make sure all is correct. Their financial controller has finally been able to retire after being begged to continue longer than she wanted to keep the manual proces working.”
What makes a great integration or software solution in your eyes?
“The best integrations automate the mundane data handling tasks that often get left to the finance teams in small businesses. This frees up these intelligent people to focus on more meaningful work where they can add much more value to the business whilst enjoying greater job satisfaction.”
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a business thinking about upgrading or connecting their systems?
“If you’re thinking about upgrading Sage 50 to either Sage 200 or Sage Intacct, ask yourself what are the real reasons driving this upgrade. Unless you’ve got over 5 people in your accounts team and you’re processing over 50,000 financial transactions per month, the chances are you might be about to make a very expensive mistake. Speak to Hyperext about how you can improve the performance of Sage 50 for free and how you can save time and money by integrating Sage 50 with your other business systems.”
What makes Hyperext different from other providers in this space?
“Hyperext is the only company on the planet solely focussed on solving integration problems for Sage 50 desktop products. This focus has helped us create the most capable APIs and Connectors on the market. Our software is helping 1,000’s of UK businesses maximise their use of Sage 50 software products.”
How do you stay up to date with emerging tech and shifting client needs?
“As a Sage Tech Partner, Hyperext has regular access to pre-release versions of Sage 50 products, so we can test our products and extend them to embrace any new features before Sage release their products to the public.
We build trust with our customers, which is imperative given the nature of our products. This allows us to develop a deep understanding of our customers’ businesses and continue to evolve of products to support their businesses as the world around us all is rapidly evolving.”
If you could automate any personal task in your life, what would it be?
“Responding to emails! I’m a slave to my inbox.”
Steven has spent 12+ years building Hyperext into what it is today, he has established the business and himself as the go-to voice for businesses seeking Sage 50 integrations.