I started in the mailroom. I ended up running a global business. Then I walked away.

Not because I failed. Because I succeeded, and realised it wasn't what I actually wanted.

Over more than twenty years I worked my way from the bottom of a corporate organisation to CEO of a £300m global company. I lived in The Hague, spent four years in Singapore, travelled the world, led large teams, and completed a management buyout. On paper, it looked like the dream.

But it never really felt right.

I was good at it, and I want to be honest about that. I learned how to build teams, delegate properly, and lead at scale. I developed skills I couldn't have got any other way. But underneath all of it, something was missing. The lifestyle was relentless, and the more I achieved the more complex and consuming my life became.

The moment everything changed

The turning point came in a taxi. Travelling back from Singapore, heavily jetlagged and burnt out, somewhere between the airport and the hotel I thought: what the hell am I doing with my life?

I cancelled my meetings the next morning and spent the day just thinking. Within three months, I'd quit.

I took a year off to decompress, reconnecting with family and friends, rediscovering a normal pace of life, and working out what I actually wanted. I live in Yorkshire. My life is relatively simple, and I realised I liked it that way. The pursuit of bigger jobs, bigger paycheques and more status wasn't success. It was just more.

The real clarity was this: a business should serve its owner's life, not consume it. Growth for the sake of growth isn't the goal. The goal is building something that gives you the freedom, fulfilment and financial security you actually want.

Why SMEs

This wasn't a choice I made after corporate life. It's where I come from.

I grew up in a family of SME owners. My family ran a chain of fruit and vegetable shops across Yorkshire. From the age of ten I was working Saturdays in the shop. After college, before I joined ICI, I worked there full time, going to the fruit markets at the crack of dawn and learning how a real business actually operates from the inside out.

So when I left corporate life, returning to that world wasn't a consolation prize. It was coming home. I've since built, run and invested in my own SMEs, which means I understand the reality from the inside. The personal stakes, the weight of decisions that land entirely on you, the fact that there's rarely anyone in your corner telling you the hard truth.

That combination of corporate scale and SME reality is what I bring to my clients.

Who I work with

My clients are smart, capable, and already successful by most measures. But something isn't right. The business isn't delivering the freedom or financial security they hoped for. They're spending too much time working and not enough on the things that matter. They've built themselves a very busy job rather than the business they set out to create.

Typically they're running businesses with turnovers between £500k and £10m, with between 10 and 100 people. Some are early in their journey. Some are looking towards an exit. Many are somewhere in between, wanting to make meaningful change to how they lead, how their business runs, and how work fits with the rest of their life.

If any of that resonates, we should probably talk.

What I'm not

I won't tell you what you want to hear, give you a generic framework and call it a plan, or make vague promises. What I will do is ask the questions you're not asking yourself, hold you accountable to the commitments you make, and back you to create change that lasts.

I bring real experience. Not just of business, but of getting it wrong, figuring it out, and finding a better way. That's what makes the difference.