This is not a pitch. It is just where I came from and why I do the work I do now.
I was born and raised in Scotland. My father came to this country with nothing. No connections, no safety net, nobody handing him anything. He built a life through hard work and doing right by people, and I watched him do it.
That is where I get whatever work ethic I have. Nobody was going to hand me anything either. If I wanted something, I had to go and build it. That has stayed true through everything since.
In my twenties I built a business from nothing into something real. I put everything into it for years. And then it collapsed, publicly and painfully, with a lot of noise around it that I had no control over.
I will not pretend that was some clean, motivational turning point. It was the hardest period of my life. I lost the business, and for a while I lost my sense of who I was without it.
I wrote a book about that whole stretch, called Fail Your Way to Success. Not because I wanted the world to know the details, but because I know what it feels like to think it is over, and I wanted to be honest about what actually gets you through it. If you want the full story, it is there. This page is not the place I retell it.
These days I build AI tools and systems for small business owners. People trying to keep a bakery running, grow a client base, get found on Google, or just win back the hours they lose to jobs a computer should be doing instead of them.
I am not interested in big corporates. I have seen too many small business owners get milked by agencies charging a monthly fee for work that never actually gets done. I would rather build one thing properly for someone who needs it than sell ten people the same template.
Maybe it is because I know what it is like to have something you built fall apart. I genuinely want to see small business owners do well. Not as a marketing line, just as the actual reason I turn up to this work.
“Every small business deserves to do well. I know what it costs to build something. That is why I take it seriously when it is yours.”