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Zoevin

Independent operator · Roseville, California

The person doing the work should be in the room.

I'm Chris Bounds. I spent twenty years owning systems, tracing outages, building automation, and explaining the mess in plain language. Zoevin is one person by design: the same person scopes the work, does it, and walks you through what comes next.

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Chris Bounds, operator of Zoevin
Chris BoundsRoseville / CA

Operator

Chris Bounds

Practice

One person

Experience

Twenty years IT

Deliverable

Written and yours

Why Zoevin is small

One operator. No handoff layer.

Small-business work gets weaker when the person who understands the problem disappears after the sales call. I keep the practice deliberately small so context survives from the first conversation to the final brief.

That also makes the boundary clear. I am not your help desk or a substitute for your IT team. I take on a defined problem, show my reasoning, and leave you able to act without me.

The work

Automation

I trace the loop before I build the shortcut.

The useful part is rarely the code. It is finding the real process, deciding what should stop for a person, testing what happens when a system fails, and handing the workflow over cleanly.

  • Process mapping before tool selection
  • Visible exceptions and a named owner
  • Rollback, operating notes, and a clean handover

Zoevin’s automation service is new and has not delivered a client engagement yet. My experience comes from building automation in salaried in-house roles.

Operating record

Twenty years tracing what broke—and explaining what to do next.

Different titles, same throughline: understand the system, find the failure, make the next move clear.

  1. 2021–2026

    Director of IT

    DB E.C.O. North America

    Owned the whole stack: cloud, networks, endpoints, vendors, budget, and audits.

  2. 2015–2021

    Automation / Senior IT

    SMA Solar

    Worked across remote site paths, firewalls, and segmentation. When a site went quiet, I traced why. This is where the automation work began.

  3. 2012–2015

    System Administrator

    e.Republic

    Ran servers, identity, backups, and patching for a media company.

  4. 2010–2012

    Network Support

    SureWest

    Supported carrier VoIP and read packet captures for a living.

  5. 2007–2010

    Internal Support

    Apple

    Learned how to explain technical problems to people who do not want a lecture.

How I work

Useful beats impressive.

I grew up around computers. When something broke, you traced it until it made sense. That habit stayed; the audience changed. Today the work has to make sense to the person responsible for the business, not only the person who knows the tool.

Look before prescribing

Sometimes the right answer is to fix two things or turn on a feature you already own.

Keep judgment with people

Automation can move records. It should not quietly inherit approvals, money, or irreversible decisions.

Leave something useful behind

The brief, workflow, and operating notes stay with you. You should not need me to interpret my own work.

Start with the problem

Tell me what keeps happening.

If it is a fit, I will explain the next step. If it is not, I will say that plainly too.

Talk through it