The whole story, not just the good bits.

The honest version

How I actually got here

I have been building things since I was old enough to get in trouble for it. Selling watches at school, until the headmaster caught me. A car valeting company at sixteen, running while I sat my GCSEs. Then setting up and running a web design business. Then co-founder of a software company backed by a seriously successful investor.

Some of it worked. Some of it did not. But every one of those experiences taught me something I genuinely could not have learned any other way, about people, about business models, about the gap between looking successful and actually being solid. It also taught me the importance of a holistic view, and in most cases of your health, and of building the life you actually want rather than the one you think you should want.

Then I hit a wall. More than once, if I am honest. There were long stretches of sleepless nights, waking up in cold sweats, pushing through things I was deeply uncomfortable with, because I had told myself that working harder was always the answer. If you are reading this, you probably know that feeling. The truth is I could not do it all, and a couple of times it tipped over into real burnout. The big one, the second and by far the worst, came in 2025 and forced me to stop work for a while. I collapsed at home and ended up alone in a hospital waiting room, still going through work in my head while my body had completely given out.

I could not work for months. And in that silence, I finally dealt with what I had been avoiding, not a business problem, but the foundations underneath everything. My health. My thinking. Whether the version of success I was chasing was actually mine.

I rebuilt. Properly. And I came back clearer than I had ever been, ready to help build a business, not just survive one.

Today I am a director at eba, working alongside the founder and the other directors to grow the business and improve its culture, systems and standards. Alongside it I do the consulting work I had always wanted to do, and I launched a podcast, because the lessons from that period were worth sharing.

That is really why I do this. I have seen first hand the stress a business can put on the person running it, and on everyone around them, because a stretched founder almost always means a stretched team. My aim, in the consulting and as a director at eba, is simple: to take that weight off founders and the people around them, so the business gets better and the lives behind it do too. If I can stop even a few people going through what I went through, that is a good impact to have.