The person behind the smithy
My name is Jon Miles, and I built The Sim Smithy to solve a problem I could see clearly but nobody seemed to be fixing.
I spent over 25 years as an account manager in the IT security industry, working with organisations like Barclays, HSBC, BP, GlaxoSmithKline, Aviva, HMRC, and many others. In that time, I sat through a lot of corporate training. Some of it was forgettable. The sessions that genuinely changed how people thought and worked were always the same kind — experiential. The ones where you made decisions, faced consequences, and learned by doing.
The problem is that bespoke experiential learning — business simulations built around your organisation’s real challenges — has always been expensive and slow. Traditional builds take weeks or months and can cost tens of thousands of pounds. That puts them out of reach for most organisations, most of the time.
I’ve been interested in artificial intelligence since my Computer Science degree, where it was the subject of my final year dissertation. So when recent advances made it possible to do things that were previously impractical, I could see an opportunity. I spent a year working alongside a colleague who designed and delivered bespoke business simulations, and I quickly saw how AI could transform the process — consuming an organisation’s learning needs and producing a tailored simulation in days rather than months, at a fraction of the traditional cost.
I built the framework in the afternoons, around the edges of daily life — fitting development in between other commitments, some weeks a few hours, others barely any. What started as an idea became a rigorous, validated process: 27 quality gates, 24+ automated playthroughs, independent documentation validation, and zero tolerance for hollow options or generic content.
The result is The Sim Smithy — bespoke board-based business simulations that are fast to produce, affordable to commission, and built to the standard that large organisations expect.
Why this background matters
I didn’t come from the learning and development industry, and I think that’s an advantage. My career was spent understanding how organisations work — how they buy, what they value, what makes them trust a supplier. I’ve seen first-hand what good training looks like from the participant’s seat, and I’ve seen how much bad training gets tolerated because the alternative seems too difficult or too expensive.
The Sim Smithy exists because it doesn’t have to be that way.
Ready to explore what a simulation could look like for your team?
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