I've spent my career inside businesses like yours.
Not by advising from the outside but from in the thick of it, running them, growing them, and occasionally rescuing them. What I do now is help owner and founder-led businesses get growing again when the way they've built things so far has stopped being enough.
How I got here
I started on a shop floor at sixteen, a Saturday job at a Jermyn Street shirtmaker, where what hooked me wasn't the shirts but two things at once: the people I was serving, and the number on the till at the end of the day. When the business took on a struggling hatmaker nobody else wanted, I took it on, and that December, selling hats it seemed faintly absurd to sell, turned out to be the brand's best month on record. Everything since has run on the same instinct: lean into the unfamiliar thing, get excited by what it could become, and keep a close eye on the numbers.
That instinct got tested on bigger things. At twenty-two I was handed Bates to run and took it from £400k to £1.5m in three years; at twenty-five I became CEO of Patey, a hundred-year-old Royal Warrant maker five years into losses, and had it back in profit within seven months. Those are businesses the size yours is now, which is the whole point, though the range runs wider too: at Goodwood I led international projects across the estate's sport, hospitality and property and the investor work behind a $20m investment day, and as Chief Innovation Officer at Real English Drinks, after an MBA at Bayes to put some structure under what I'd done by instinct, I built the operating model for its own-brand division and modelled the acquisitions behind 50% growth in group turnover.
The portfolio itself began by accident. The pandemic stopped my career in its tracks, and for the first time since I was sixteen I had no idea what was next, so I gave a year to causes I cared about, including Frontline.Live, an open-source data platform built during the PPE crisis and still running in conflict zones. It was the first time I'd built my own mix of work rather than holding a single job, and it became what I do now: a portfolio of commercial work for owner and founder-led businesses, from a hospitality and coworking venue taken from strategy through to the systems that run it, to a creative event agency finding its voice, and a handful of others.
How I work
A few things are always true about how I work.
I start with possibility rather than problems, because the first thing I look for is what your business could become, since that's what pulls everyone forward, and the honest diagnosis comes after that.
I work alongside the people already in the business rather than over their heads, and I read a room quickly, listen for what isn't being said, and stay calm when things feel stuck, which is usually when it helps most, because I care a great deal about getting it right, and I'd rather tell you something straight than dress it up.
I build for you to need me less, not more, so you stay in control of your business and the decisions in it, and what you're left with is capability and a plan you own, which means nothing here only works while I'm in the room, and you're never holding something you can't run yourself.