About me
From Scots Guards machine gunner to senior Eloqua developer
I help serious marketing teams ship reliable campaigns at scale. Before I started working in Eloqua and marketing automation, I served in the infantry with the First Battalion Scots Guards as a machine gunner in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today I use that discipline, focus and calm under pressure to deliver complex work for B2B organisations.
This page is here so you can see who I am as a person as well as what I can build for you.
My passions and personality
Under the job title and technology stack there is a real person. This is the version of me you would get if we were sat in a café or a bar, not a meeting room. The same curiosity and stubbornness that drives my work also shows up in the rest of my life.
Let us start with some fun facts
- I split my time between Europe and Rio de Janeiro whenever I can get away.
- My school reports, especially IT, used to make my parents cry.
- I once worked in a call center selling double glazing.
- I love psytrance.
- I do not understand half the coffees on the menu in Starbucks.
- My favourite food is instant noodles from the Chinese supermarket.
- I got my thumb stuck in a pencil sharpener when I was eight.
Childhood everywhere, then the army
I was born in the UK and grew up almost everywhere else. My father served in the army, so we moved from Hong Kong to Germany and eventually to Scotland. School and I did not get along very well. I wanted adventure, not classrooms, so at seventeen I left and followed my father into the army.
I joined the infantry and served in the First Battalion Scots Guards as a machine gunner, deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq. Those years taught me how to stay calm when everything around you wants to turn into chaos, how to look after the people next to you and how important clear communication is when it really matters.
The two versions of me
My career feels a little like a boxing match between two versions of myself.
In the red corner you have Corporal Staunton. Clean shaven, fit as a fiddle, wearing a combat smock and carrying a machine gun. In the blue corner you have business casual Greg. Slightly softer around the edges, sporting stubble, fuelled by coffee and building Eloqua solutions.
The blue corner won, mostly because it is easier to type than to carry a general purpose machine gun for a living. The stories behind that transition are still best told in person over a beer or two.
Travel, people and perspective
Outside of work I chase adventure. Curiosity has always been my strongest compass, long before I ever wrote a line of code. I started travelling in the days before wifi, when you actually had to talk to people in hostels, swap stories with strangers and figure things out without Google Maps pointing you in the right direction.
Travel changed how I see the world. It taught me how to be resourceful, how to stay calm when plans fall apart, and how important it is to be open to whatever (and whoever) crosses your path. Those lessons carry into my work today more than anything I learned in a classroom.
Along the way I have met every type of person imaginable. Good, bad, kind, chaotic, honest, unreliable, wildly interesting and painfully boring. Each one left some kind of mark. Some taught me patience, some taught me resilience, and some taught me what not to do ever again.
Those people and those journeys shaped how I work with teams today. If you find me easy to collaborate with, you can thank them. If you do not… well, you can probably blame a few of them as well.
What I have done and what I can do
If you want the full detail of what I have delivered, the systems I have built and the campaigns I have helped launch, my resume covers the essentials. I do not embellish anything. There is no value in pretending to know things you do not.
What you see on my CV is what I can actually deliver for you. That usually means helping you stabilise Eloqua, speed up campaign delivery, design cleaner data models, build safer integrations and create a more reliable foundation for your marketing team.
A few quick questions people ask
Here are some straightforward answers to common questions about how I work and what I bring to a team.
What do you actually do day to day?
I design and build Eloqua campaigns, programs, integrations and data flows. I spend a lot of time fixing fragile setups, creating cleaner structures and helping marketing teams move from firefighting to a more predictable way of working.
How does your army background show up in your work?
The infantry taught me discipline, clarity and how to stay calm when timelines are tight and stakes are high. It also taught me how to look after the people around me. Those habits carry into every project I work on.
What is your working style with clients?
I am direct but friendly. I prefer clear conversations over buzzwords. I like to understand the real business problem, not just the technical request, then deliver something that holds up under pressure in the real world.
Ready to talk about your Eloqua challenges
If you want a senior Eloqua expert who brings discipline, clarity and reliability, I would be happy to speak. Tell me what is slowing your team down and I will give you a clear view on how I can help.
No pressure and no fuss. Just a straightforward conversation.