A practice, not an agency.

Stoic Software is Mark Heaver’s practice, based in North East England. There is no team page because there is no team theatre — the person you talk to is the person who builds and runs your system.

The person

Mark has built software for almost thirty years, professionally since 2003. The route here runs through financial services, oil and gas, consumer platforms serving hundreds of thousands of users, and software consultancies, building for whatever industry came through the door. The biggest single build so far: a complete insurance broker management system, built from scratch to service a book of around £3.75 million in premiums — over £750,000 in commission — including delegated-authority work with major insurers.

The proof closest to hand is FiftyPlus, a UK business that runs day to day on software he designed, built and still operates — the case study tells that story with the numbers counted straight from the repository.

Why this practice exists

For most of those thirty years, work like this needed a team — a project manager, designers, developers, testers — which is why custom software was only ever built for companies with corporate budgets. That has changed: AI agents now write the software, and Mark supervises them the way he used to supervise the team. Every plan approved by him, every change clicked through by him before it ships.

The point of Stoic is what that change makes possible: a premium consultation service, affordable to the businesses that were always priced out of it. Not the enterprises the big consultancies chase — the owner-run businesses that actually needed the help.

Why the North East matters

Stoic is based here on purpose, and works here by preference. The audit starts with a full day inside your business, which works best when your business is a drive away, not a flight. And accountability is easier to trust when it’s local: the person running your system has a reputation that lives in the same place yours does — though for the right client, the day on site travels; Leeds or Carlisle is no obstacle.

Why “Stoic”

The name is a promise about temperament: calm and level-headed — and a deliberate pushback against the hype around AI, and against anyone promising their system solves everyone’s problems. Classic and considered, more interested in what works than what’s new.

The practice is deliberately small. A small number of new clients each year means every system gets built properly and run personally — and it means the accountability promise is real: Mark’s name is on the escalation path of every contract, and if a system is down or data is at risk, he responds personally within hours.

If that sounds like the kind of person you’d want running the software your business depends on, book an audit conversation.