Who am I?

I'm Kaleel Zibe and I live in Newcastle with my wife and two kids. The silly name is arabic (dad was Lebanese), although I've lived in England since the age of two after emigrating from New Guinea.

I have a wide range of experience with business and IT and divide my time between web design and wildlife photography - soon to hopefully go professional with the latter.

A little history

After graduating in Computer Science (BSc hons) at university, I worked as a software engineer for an industrial software company called Hexatec.

After a few years, the family business, Multichem Ltd. was at an exciting phase of growth and I eagerly joined, doing a bit of everything. A 'bit of everything' included making the tea, putting labels on bottles, assembling pens and various office work. After a while, I ended up being the Administrator and doing the accounts as the company grew.

Eventually Multichem became large enough to need an IT department and I was appointed IT Manager then IT Director. Amongst other things (such as implementing high up-time clustered servers) I started to experiment with web software and designed the first two iterations of the company's web site - although I don't meddle with it now!

The company expanded into a good sized small business exporting bulk ink round the world to over 30 countries and turning over £2.5m. Because of the hundreds of tonnes we sold overseas we won the Queen's Award for International Trade in 2002. We were chuffed to bits.

In 2003 my father, George - founder of Multichem, tragically died before his time and I took over as Managing Director. The company needed to be steadied and put on a new course of growth, so for three years I ran the company, travelling all over the world. Fantastic as this sounds, I became increasingly frustrated with the amount of stress the job generated.

And then...

After 13 years at Multichem, In February 2007 I fired myself!

I promoted our then General Manager to the post of Managing Director. He's thriving in the post and I now love my job again. Exactly what I had intended.

I still retain a majority shareholding in Multichem and am regularly in touch at arms length but do my best not to meddle. This gives me the time I need to do what I really enjoy doing.

Web design was a natural progression for me, so I researched the latest trends, updated to the most recent versions of the top Adobe software and read mountains of books and web sites. Newcastle Web Factory was born!

It took several months of making sure I had covered all the necessary ground before I was happy to officially start the company and I'm now delighted with the positive feedback I get on the sites I design.

Oh and...

I'm also in the process of setting up another business for my photography. If you're interested, the web site's at www.kaleelzibe.com.