My title has changed over the years (CEO, COO, CPO) but the job is the same: I come into a business at a turning point, build the teams, products and commercial engine it needs, and grow it, across very different sectors. The thread I care about most is the built environment: I've spent 20 years designing the spaces people stay, live and work in, and the digital products that sit on top of them, because how something is designed decides how it feels and how it performs.
At Business Leader I did more than run the company: I designed and built its Growth Programme, turning Sir Richard Harpin's book How to Make a Billion in 9 Steps into a structured method for scaling founder-led businesses from £3m to £250m, built with Richard himself, who scaled and exited HomeServe for £4.1bn. Turning how to scale a company into a repeatable method, not just doing it once, is the thinking I bring to founders and boards as an advisor and non-executive director.
Across Native, Selina, The Conduit and now Business Leader, the businesses share a shape: physical assets, customer communities, recurring revenue, technology, and a content or experience layer. I'm most at home where hospitality, membership, real estate and technology intersect, building products that work commercially and that people actually enjoy using.
That conviction is the practical core of the work. Across Native, Selina and The Conduit I owned the design and development of the physical product, the hotels, clubs and buildings themselves, because how a space is designed shapes how people feel in it, how often they come back and what they spend. Experience design is commercial. More recently the work has been about blending the physical and the digital, the building and the app, the room and the membership, so the experience stays seamless whether someone is on site or on their phone.
I've run the operations and built the product, both the physical product and design, and the technology behind it. I've carried £185m P&Ls and led teams of 3,100 across 16 countries, and I've led the design and development of the physical product alongside the technology, product and data teams behind the platforms, around 80 engineers, product managers and data people, building them rather than just sponsoring them, through to AI integration.
None of this has been a one-off. Native grew to 1,700 apartments and an exit; Selina reached global scale and a Nasdaq listing; Business Leader has been rebuilt around AI and is growing fast. Different businesses, different sectors, but I went at each the same way: get the foundations, the people and the commercial model right first.
Although much of my career has been inside established organisations, the pattern is entrepreneurial, the Livocity start-up within Unite, the Remote Year acquisition and turnaround, The Conduit's international expansion, the Business Leader transformation. I'd rather build the next version of a business than maintain the current one.
I'm as comfortable with the numbers as the growth. I've carried P&Ls up to £185m and owned them end to end, without taking my eye off product, customer experience and building the business.
