The label on the door has changed (CEO, COO, CPO), but the work hasn't. I repeatedly enter businesses at an inflection point, build the systems, teams, products and commercial engines required for scale, and then drive growth. The sector varies; the playbook doesn't.
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, designing products that improve both commercial performance and human experience.
What's relatively uncommon is the combination of operator and product leader in one person. I've carried £185m P&Ls and led 3,100-person teams across 16 countries, and I've led technology and product teams of around 80, engineers, product managers and data, building the platforms themselves, not just owning them, through to AI integration. Most executives are one or the other. I've spent my career being both.
The achievements are less about individual sales heroics and more about operating systems that scale: Native to 1,700 apartments and an exit; Selina to global reach and a Nasdaq listing; rebuilding Business Leader's growth infrastructure with AI at its core. Build the system, and the growth compounds.
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 commercially and financially driven in equal measure: I've carried P&Ls up to £185m and owned the numbers end to end, while staying focused on growth, product, customer experience, scale and building. Strong on both value creation and value capture.
