I turned down a university place to go and work underwater.
Forty years building things that run without me. Now I do the same for founders.
Not theory. I've built, run, and sold at exactly the stage you're in now.
$2M → $24M · 7× Inc 5000 · Built & sold Bucket.io, 2024 · 40 years getting things done
30 minutes. You'll leave knowing exactly where your bottleneck is.
I'm a Yorkshireman. I still sound like one.
My grandfather ran glasshouses in Yorkshire. I grew up watching him work. Patient, methodical, every task done in the right order, no drama about it.
I didn't stay long. I won a scholarship to Loughborough to read chemistry and maths, and my friend Daniel got a place at Brighton doing history of art. He had four hours a week of tutor time. I had forty. Same level of degree at the end of it.
That was the first time I ran the numbers on something and didn't like the answer. I turned the scholarship down and went and learned to dive instead.
North Sea. Gulf of Mexico. West Africa. One of the youngest qualified at the time. Two degrees and an MBA came later, all of it done while working. I've never stopped.
A mile underwater, you learn things that don't leave you.
Calm beats panic. The system keeps you alive. The small detail you can't be bothered with is the one that kills you. Trust the crew, or don't go down at all.
I've run every business I've touched since the same way.
After that, I never did the same job twice. It was always the same job.
My first job after the water was cinemas. ABC, then Thorn EMI, then Cannon. I inherited buildings that weren't working and left them trading. The actual work was always the same: find what's holding it back, fix the execution layer, and get out of the way.
Theatre next. I was commercial director at a venue in Reading when Rothmans Grand Prix came to us for the UK leg of their snooker world tour. Three consecutive years. I watched how a venue could be ordinary for nine months, then you add the right structure and it becomes something people travel for.
Then a seaside pavilion. Museums, a working harbour, a town that had quietly given up on itself. I left it with a full events programme and something it hadn't had in a while: a plan that kept working when I wasn't there.
By 1995 I'd built one of the UK's first commercial tourism websites. Same reason. Something was being left on the table, and the table had just got a lot bigger.
Diving, cinemas, snooker, a harbour, the internet. None of it connected, except all of it was identical.
I just didn't have a word for what I was yet.
And if you're running a business that's outgrown the way you run it, you already know which half you're stuck on.
Then I met Ryan Levesque, and forty years finally had a name.
I was in Ryan's mastermind, trying to scale a supplement company I'd built. While I was there I helped three of the other members, just because that's what I do. Ryan noticed.
He asked if I'd come and work with him. I turned him down. Three times.
"If I can't hire you, where do I find someone like you?"
"I'm sorry Ryan, there's only one of me."
The deal got done in a sauna at a retreat in Texas. I started as a secret three-month contract. "I'm the world's worst employee," I told him. "I've never had managers. I had handlers."
His problem was the same one I'd been fixing for twenty years. He had all the plans. He set the plans. And they just fell apart.
There's a name for it, and I got it from a book called Rocket Fuel. Two jobs sit at the top of every growing business. The visionary sees what's possible and won't stop having ideas. The integrator turns all of that into things that actually happen: the operating rhythm, the accountability, the decisions that stop waiting on one person.
Ryan was the visionary. Forty years, and I'd been the other one the whole time.
A visionary without an integrator always ends up in the same place. The ideas keep coming, the business can't keep up, and it only ever moves as fast as one tired person. Ryan was there at two million a year. The first launch I worked on hit $3 million. Nine years later: $24 million, 4× Inc 5000, a team of a hundred people.
In parallel, Ryan and I co-founded Bucket.io, a market-segmentation SaaS built part-time from scratch. 3× Inc 5000, sold to ScoreApp in 2024.
"I am not creative. But I will get it done."
I retired again in 2024. It didn't take either.
There are two things I'm genuinely good at. One is numbers, not for the sake of it, but because the right numbers tell you whether something's working before you can feel it. The other is people. I'm genuinely interested in the humans in an organisation in a way that most operators aren't. Both of those things matter if you're going to fix how a business actually runs.
I live in Dorset on three acres, with a Victorian kitchen garden I'm slowly restoring. I've been fishing since I was eight. I cycle. I've been running AI agents through most of my work since 2019. I'm 61, and I'm more useful to a scaling founder now than I was at 40, because I've seen the same patterns enough times to know what's actually going on.
I mentor for Young Enterprise and sit on the Dorset Business Mentors panel. I give time because it matters to me, not because it looks good.
"I'm just a builder who can't stop."
You are no longer accelerating the business. You are holding it at its current speed.
Everything runs through you. Every decision, every client email, every problem that lands. You told yourself that's just what being a founder is.
You're running out of ways to believe it.
Most founders I talk to have already tried. A coach. A head of ops. An EOS implementation that stalled after four months. None of it fixed the execution layer, because none of it was designed to. That's not a people problem. It's a structure problem. And structure is exactly what I do.
Every quarter you stay the bottleneck is growth you don't get back. And an exit value that prices your absence in as a risk.
If that's where you are, we should talk.
I take on three to five founders at a time now. You might be one of them.
You'll leave the first call knowing exactly where your bottleneck is.
Two long sessions a month, direct access in between, and a written 90-day plan in month one. A business that keeps moving when you're not in the room, and a quarter that doesn't look like the last three. That's what this builds towards. Thirty minutes. No pitch. No deck.
Book a free callNo pitch. No obligation. If I can't help, I'll tell you that too.
Find your bottleneck in 2 minutes →
Most founders worry it's too late or too tangled. It isn't. The first call tells you exactly where to start.