Lewis Baybutt on Empowering Tech Futures

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is all the way from the United Kingdom. He works at ANS Group as the Power Platform Functional Consultant on his way to CEO. He was first awarded MVP in 2023. He's a bill of a low coat and tech obsessed geek power addict. Of course, he started his career around Microsoft 365 and business application while still in high school, so started off very young straight into a Power Platform career working at a Microsoft Gold partner. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Lewis, welcome to the show.

Lewis Baybutt: 1:43
Mark, thank you so, so much for having me. This is awesome, this is great. How are you?

Mark Smith: 1:47
Good, good, as I was saying, pre-show that you're pretty famous across the world. That you're pretty famous across the world, you will be, I assume, one of our lowest-aged MVPs joining the community, which is a testament to the great work that you're doing in the community, which is highly, highly, highly impressive. But before we get underway and unpick your career thus far, tell us a bit about food, family, family and fun. And how old are you? I don't normally ask how old people are, but I just want to give the audience an idea of how young one can be to get in this game yeah, no sure.

Lewis Baybutt: 2:27
So, food, family and fun. So, uh oh, food, favorite food now. Now, this is this, but this is a really easy one for me. I am not the one that's like I'm going to jump between a bunch of different things. I love loads of food, right, I love loads of food, but chicken katsu, curry and Wagamamas. I am known for being there like 24-7. So when people like me on teams in an evening, they're like why are you still online? I'm like I'm at Wagamamas though, so it's fine, right.

Lewis Baybutt: 2:53
So that's that's an absolute standard, straight away family. So I'll jump to the age thing straight away, because I'm 19. So I'm I'm, you know, not that far out of um high school, as you said. So I still live with my parents at the moment. I still live with my family um, at home. I travel between my house and my partner's house um quite regularly, um between somewhere called Milton Keynes, or quite close to Milton Keynes, and Reading in the UK. Love family. Family is cool. And last one, what was the last one? Friends, I don't get loads of time to see friends right.

Mark Smith: 3:25
What about fun? What do you do for fun, fun?

Lewis Baybutt: 3:27
Fun, fun, fun. Oh, what do I do for fun? Oh my God, you know this is also another one that I'm terrible at answering, because everyone knows that I'm just stuck at my desk like 24-7. I am trying lately so much to step away, though, but community stuff is fun. Conferences, events, meeting up with people in the community, doing stuff like this this is awesome. And well, seeing friends as well. Right, you do a bit of that stuff too.

Mark Smith: 3:53
I thought I just saw some happy snaps in New York City or something like that.

Lewis Baybutt: 3:57
Yes, yes, I went to NYC with my family for Christmas. That was literally awesome. That was so, so cool. I really really want to live in New York now, so that's definitely like on a back thing one day for sure, absolutely, yeah.

Mark Smith: 4:13
That's incredible.

Lewis Baybutt: 4:14
Yeah, I'd love to. I really love city, cities like. I'd love to live in a city I live like. So milton keynes in the uk is considered a quote city. I wouldn't really call it like a proper city. I imagine you may have been to milton keynes before.

Mark Smith: 4:29
I don't know if you lived in the uk I've not reading is the closest I've been to where you are okay, cool okay, uh well, I mean, if you've been to reading you I've not Reading is the closest I've been to where you are.

Lewis Baybutt: 4:36
Okay, cool, okay. Well, I mean, if you've been to Reading, you can imagine Reading is somewhat of a city. They don't actually call it a city. I don't think it has a cathedral. But Milton Keynes, they call it a city. It's just a land of, like roads and roundabouts, a million roundabouts. It's like the Florida grid system, but instead of you know what, do they call them intersections. Instead of that, they use roundabouts everywhere and there's just like thousands of them. It's ridiculous. That's like, yeah, it's not the vibe of a city, though, right, it's nothing like London, it's nothing like New York, it's nothing like any of that. So I'd love to live in New York one day.

Mark Smith: 5:12
So why are we surprised? I have done a New York Christmas what would have been 2018, I think and I've done a London Christmas and in my mind, nothing beats London, nothing beats Piccadilly Circus, nothing beats that sense of it. Is the most festive time of year, the lights, the, and I suppose what it is. You get time of year, the lights, the, and I suppose what it is. You get the lights in New York. You know, I've been to the big Christmas tree, all that, but it's all commercial lights, it's all brands and their Christmas themes, where London is just Christmas for Christmas, for Christmas, and that I just love it. Yeah.

Lewis Baybutt: 5:50
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, new York was cool because it was New York. It didn't feel like if I'd gone there in summer, though, or like if I went there just after Christmas, it would have felt a whole lot different, for being Christmas right, like there were lights and there was, like you know, when you get in a New York taxi it would play like the same damn Christmas song every single time. You got in that kind stuff, but it was like you know. It was like you put up a few house decorations and kind of stuff like that. It wasn't like the mega stuff that London seems to do. It wasn't like you have it strung across the roads and like you know, like the likes of Oxford Street or Regent Street and stuff like that, where they have it like all plastered everywhere and you know, no, london definitely beats it, for sure.

Mark Smith: 6:36
When was the very first time that you found out about something within the Power Platform?

Lewis Baybutt: 6:42
The first time I found out about Power Platform was so I had done a little bit of Microsoft 365 stuff and I did that with my Swimboard.

Mark Smith: 6:52
How did, how had you done that, how had you done that at school?

Lewis Baybutt: 6:55
So it was actually preschool? To be honest, it wasn't preschool.

Mark Smith: 6:59
You were in preschool Like four years. Four years old, you started.

Lewis Baybutt: 7:05
But my journey started outside of school actually, preschool is the wrong word Outside of school. And I was that year group, right, that was the ones that when COVID hit, they were like no GCSEs, you guys are done for the year. Now we're going gonna like figure out what we would have graded you. You don't actually get the opportunity to take your exams but, lucky you, you get grades for free and you don't have to sit any tests or anything. Um, and we had like the period between, I think maybe like march and september, where people did nothing like you just were on summer for that long. Um, and during that period I so what before that? Well, yeah, if we take another step back, I never go from the beginning. I always have to take another step back. But if we take another step back, whilst I was actually in school, still, I used to be um a regional swimmer, so I swam um at the level of the southeast region in england.

Lewis Baybutt: 7:57
Um, eventually I got really, really fed up of. I absolutely despised it. At one point, you know, we were having to do like 16 hours of training a week. It was like up at 4.30 on multiple days of the week. It was nuts. So I was like nope, don't want to do this anymore. But I really, really loved the swim club that I was a part of still right. So I decided that, yeah, I'm going to step away from it it. But then we had this thing where COVID hit and I wanted to still stay involved. Now, before COVID hit, I was doing like poolside volunteering and coaching and stuff like that where I could be there and still stay involved. But then COVID hit and it was like, okay, well, I'm not doing like the online exercise classes that all of the swimmers are doing. There's nothing I can really help out with in terms of like coaching or anything like that, because they actually like need proper, like exercise and fitness coaches to do this online training with them. So I was like, well, hey, I'll work with like their admin and committee team whilst I'm doing absolutely nothing during the summer period, and I decided that I would start, you know, working with that admin and committee membership type teams, the people that were doing the finances, etc.

Lewis Baybutt: 9:00
And I came into this, this group of people and they were all using like personal email addresses. There was like data everywhere that shouldn't have been everywhere. It was so unorganized, no one was on the same page. The concept of like a shared file like attachments were there. File like attachments were there. Right, they lived and breathed on attachments.

Lewis Baybutt: 9:25
So I decided that, you know, knowing that my school was doing this Microsoft thing in the background, everyone was doing school on teams but I wasn't part of it because I was that year that wasn't doing anything. I was like, well, that's kind of like, I feel like I'd really like to be involved in some of the cool techie stuff that they're doing. All sat at home on teams doing the school still. So I was like, well, hey, let me bring that stuff over into this world that I'm in. Let's take a look at Microsoft 365. I know that you know I've used it before, like the family package where you just get, you know, the office applications and OneDrive etc. And I was like, let me look at what the business side looks like and we can, we can have a chat here. And you know it didn't take me too long and I managed to convince the treasurer of the club to spend, I think, however much you know it cost to buy 30 licenses for volunteers and coaches at the club and I rolled out Microsoft 365, having never touched the business version of it within two days. Um, you know it was a really simple setup. We just rolled out Teams and Outlook and we left it at that to begin with.

Lewis Baybutt: 10:19
Then I came back to sixth form and you know, a levels in school and that kind of stuff in September and we were doing the thing you know. You know, getting into sixth form, figuring it out, those first couple of months of a levels, just settling in kind of thing. And then they started to offer out like these different volunteering opportunities, because when you get to the end of sixth form and you're starting to do UCAS applications and stuff like that for university, they always want to see extra stuff that you've done outside of just your study. So if it's like really really simple volunteering opportunities, like you've had a coffee bar at lunch or whatever it is, and those were the kind of things they were offering I was like, ok, that's great, I have these skills over here, though, I know you're a Microsoft school, I know that you're on the incubator program and you're going for a Microsoft showcase school. Um, can I help? Is there anything I can get involved with? And the school directly didn't have anything to begin with, but the thing is because we had this COVID thing.

Lewis Baybutt: 11:11
A bunch of students fell behind during, um, that lockdown period and the government basically gave schools grants to bring those students back out of school hours with tutoring sort of initiatives and stuff like that. So they had this whole like extra school thing going on outside of the normal school process and the systems that they were using, etc. And they had a bunch of these tutoring contracts suddenly that they needed to fulfill. They had all of these tutors that they'd hired for out of you know, school time working. Because full-time staff weren't doing this, they hired additional tutors for this stuff they needed to manage, like safeguarding and contacts for parents, where they were doing it across the trust rather than just via one of the schools. And, you know, because they weren't using any of those school systems, they couldn't just tap into that data. They needed to capture all of it in their own little silo and they were like, well, hey, we can still stick this in our tenant.

Lewis Baybutt: 12:04
And we found this power apps button where we've been using forms before, and it's not that you can't do that much. We can't, you know, do all of this validation stuff that we want to do. We can't hide and show this stuff to the extent that we want to do it at. You know, but we found this power apps button and we feel like, you know, maybe this could do some stuff with some forms that we want to do. So they're like, okay, go check out this Power Apps thing. Apparently it does what we need it to do. You're going to tell us how it works.

Lewis Baybutt: 12:30
I'm like, okay, so I took it away and I genuinely sat on this thing for a month going, nope, don't like it, don't like it, this isn't a database. This is not a database. This is not where I'm putting the data. That does not look right at all. And then eventually, I feel like you just get to a point and you're like I'm just going to build something really really simple, accept how it works, build a thing, and then it turns out to actually be really really damn simple. And that was the first time, you know, time I had touched PowerApps or Power Platform or any of the products within the suite kind of thing, and it sort of went from there. So it was helping a tutoring nonprofit organization within my school's multi-academy trust to start resolving some of the business problems they were having with just managing, you know student and tutoring contracts. So that, yeah, that was it.

Mark Smith: 13:23
So you're still at school while this is all happening.

Lewis Baybutt: 13:25
I was, yes, I was at the start of the two-year sixth form program.

Mark Smith: 13:29
Yeah, so who discovered you? How did you get out of there into the community? And you know, 19 years old MVP. Tell me about that journey.

Lewis Baybutt: 13:39
Oh, how did I get started in the community? You know, the biggest uplift was probably the webcast that I did with Donna Sarkar, which was the let's Code More Power webcast at the time. I'm trying to think how I actually ended up doing it. You know, I think this sounds crazy, right, but I had watched some of these videos and stuff like that and it was actually just watching other people on YouTube and go, oh my God, that's so cool that they built that thing and I would spend like all of this time literally just watching the Microsoft 365 community and product YouTube channels, being like, oh my God, that feature is so cool, oh my God, we can build something with that. I want to get my hands on it. Kind of thing.

Lewis Baybutt: 14:39
No-transcript stage, when you're like working with a really small multi-academic trust, is you're, you're getting through to that first line of support that microsoft have? You know it's not a unified contract, it's not anything on like premier level support, anything like a critical situation, none of that. No, no, no. So you don't get like any sort of enhanced level of support straight away. You're right at the front of the queue, kind of thing. Is what it felt like, um, but I I ended up on a call with a support engineer and I don't think they really understood what we were asking to begin with.

Lewis Baybutt: 15:14
Obviously, I feel like this kind of query for them is probably not the typical one that they get on a support line. I'm like, no, but you don't understand. I have to do this webcast and, like I, I'd love to like figure out if we can make a case study on what we've been doing with with this um, with this academy and with, you know, with our education tools, um, and eventually, somehow, after a while, you know, I think I get the feeling that people in powercat were eventually copied in because it started to talk about case study stuff like that. I remember I forget the guy's name in the community. Oh my God, the teacher that worked ended up at Microsoft.

Mark Smith: 15:53
Dan Dan.

Lewis Baybutt: 15:55
He went by his teacher's name still Mr Dang Dang, that oh yeah, no, yeah, that's it, that's it yes, absolutely yeah.

Lewis Baybutt: 16:03
Um, and he was copied in on an email thread at some point and I was like, okay, cool, I have some people now. All right, this is good. Um, I was approaching it as a case study to begin with. So I was like, okay, yeah, let's do a case study on this thing. That would be awesome. This is the stats. This is what we've been doing. They're like they're looking at telemetry and they're like we can't't see that there are enough people using this to make it a Microsoft case study just yet. But they're like well, hey, they followed up at some point. They're like, hey, we have this person introduced like Donna Sarkar. This is the person. She's heard about your thing. She wants to do a webcast with you. And then we got on this call together and recorded this webcast and that's how I became part of the community. That's literally like the first thing. Yeah, it was so cool.

Mark Smith: 16:47
Donna shined some light on you and things took off. Okay, that's epic. That's an epic story. And, of course, now you're working at ANS and I know a lot of rock stars in ANS. Tell me, how did you school finish?

Lewis Baybutt: 17:04
What happened next? So school finished? What happened next, so school finished? Now I said that thing about I had the, the swim club that I used to be really, really involved with and I knew someone at that swim club that was the cto of a really small partner in weedon beck in northamptonshire, um in the uk, and I went to work with another mvp consultancy just starting to do stuff on dynamics and power platform.

Lewis Baybutt: 17:28
To begin with I just did really simple stuff around internal dynamics. In fact it wasn't really really simple, I tell a lie. It was just internal projects and the first thing that I was, you know, chucked into straight away was an upgrade from psa to project operations straight away. I mean just you know a couple of um solutions on the power platform. I was straight into like dynamics world and it was. That was a real, like good first bit of experience. Um, I was like untangling huge messes of dynamics customizations with solutions that somehow ended up managed and dependent on each other, which was its own can of worms. It was, yeah, that was kind of crazy. And then I did that for like three months. Um, so it went to an extent we got stuff kind of clean. It didn't go crazy far in terms of like, we developed strategy and started building like huge backlogs and and stuff like that. But I did that for like two to three months and then I went straight from there into consultancy with that partner where the head of the practice there was like no, I need to put you on my customer work. Now we have these customers that are waiting for this stuff to be done. Come join and do this over here.

Lewis Baybutt: 18:37
So I worked on quite a few different customers there. We were doing all sorts of stuff like solutions on Dataverse model-driven apps that were like solutions for date document management between. It was almost like there was a custom solution that we built which was um, to replace the out-of-the-box functionality for the sharepoint integration with mdas, um and it. We built this custom solution for that that had enhanced functionality, um. So that was one of the things I worked on. I worked on a canvas app solution for one of the uk's major railway companies um, or operators, sorry, um and that was just really simple policy management and document management that they were doing in sharepoint libraries with approvals processes and stuff like that on the top of it in canvas apps as well and stuff like you know, document conversion. So when they, you know, published a document, it became a pdf and stuff like that really really simple, cool stuff.

Lewis Baybutt: 19:27
Um, I worked with a number of different other organizations whilst I was there and then I got my mvp whilst I was there last february I think it was last feb. Um, so, yeah, I spent some more time there and then I think last april it was I moved to ANS as a functional engineer slash consultant in our COE team, so I've been in ANS for quite a while now. Ans has provided an enormous opportunity in terms of the accounts I get to work with. I work with an account that has an absolute insane number of low-code assets I'm sure Chris Huntingford has screamed about so much already, right. And then another customer which is an absolutely ginormous implementation of Omnichannel Live Chat, which has been really really fun to work with as well, because I didn't know Omnichannel before I came to ANS and I was thrown onto this customer straight away and I'm like okay, I'll learn Omnichannel so I can work onto this customer straight away.

Lewis Baybutt: 20:23
And I'm like, okay, I'll learn Omnichannel so I can work with this. So there's some really cool stuff that I'm doing there in terms of collaboration with Microsoft and the customer and just a really huge implementation of LiveChat and Omnichannel, which is really cool. And then it was, you know, sort of around December time last year. I started to do more sort of architecture work and stuff like that, which for one of my customers I've been doing since the start, but started to do more of that around december and then I've transitioned into a csa role. I think it was last monday was the official date of change. I've been doing it for like quite a long long while longer, but but last monday, I think, was the official change into the csa.

Mark Smith: 21:01
Amazing amazing, amazing, amazing. What a journey. Who nominated you to get you in the program MVP?

Lewis Baybutt: 21:07
Charlie Phipps. So, oh, this was a cool. This was a cool thing actually that I missed out. Whilst I was at hybrid, the consultancy I used to work at November, I think, of 2022, I think or maybe it was. I don't know if Ignite was in November, but 2022 Ignite they did the spotlights on different countries and they did almost like on-tour spotlights and I spoke at the UK spotlight of Microsoft Ignite, which was really really cool.

Lewis Baybutt: 21:35
And I did a session with Chris Huntingford, peter Weinstra and Charlie Phipps where we talked about what was it. It was like a unified cloud ecosystem approach. So whether we put all of our ducks in one basket or eggs in one basket, sorry or whether we look at a multi-cloud approach and stuff like that, we spoke about the whole thing around the three Microsoft clouds and the unified cloud and the different sort of vendor approaches and stuff like that, which was really really awesome, because it was a completely different thing to what I had done before. You know, I was in that very siloed space which was I build apps on low code, which was completely different for that session, and that was so, so much broader and so much more interesting, and I almost led that roundtable between the four of us and kept the guys in check, so to speak, and asked questions and they and they had to throw back responses and stuff like that, and it was after that session that Charlie nominated me for the program. So, yeah, that was. That was an awesome experience, that was great.

Mark Smith: 22:36
So, so good. I feel like I could talk for ages with you. We're well over time already. I hope to see you at um dynamic minds in uh, slovenia.

Lewis Baybutt: 22:48
Hopefully you're going, yeah yeah, I I have not. I don't know. Is it too late to book?

Mark Smith: 22:53
it's may, it's may. I'm gonna fly all the way from new zealand, so I'm expecting to see you there. So twist, go, go, go go. Find uh somebody that uh has the corporate credit card, if you don't have one, and get them to get you at that event Critically important. You'll love it. It's the conference of all conferences to attend, so I hear, hence why I'm coming. But yeah, lewis, it's been awesome talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Lewis Baybutt: 23:26
Thank you so much, Mark. It's been awesome talking to you.

Mark Smith: 23:29
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, mark, it's been great. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ36365guide. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.