Thirty-five years fixing how businesses run. Here is how that began, and what it taught me about finding the break, fixing it, and building the thing that makes the fix last.
In February 2001 I was standing outside a grey office building in the UK when a friend texted me.
It said, in not so many words, that the BPO industry was about to take off in the Philippines and I needed to get on a plane.
I had spent twelve years in that industry by then, working my way up through SITEL and Teleperformance and consulting on the side. BPO ran through my veins.
Two weeks later I was in Manila, telling myself it was a holiday.
It was not a holiday.
Within a week I could see what most people could not yet see. I had walked into the UK industry as a newbie when it was barely established. Now I was walking into another emerging market on the other side of the world, except this time I already knew how it all worked.
Twelve years back in time, without losing twelve years of experience.
Everyone I knew thought I had lost my mind. I went home, dropped everything, and six weeks later flew back for good.
Within a month I had landed my first twelve-month consulting contract. Several more followed.
I spent the next few years being brought into businesses across the Philippines to fix what was not working. The ones chasing the wrong deals. The ones whose manual processes were buckling under growth. The ones with a leaking commercial engine.
Find the break, fix it, leave them stronger. It is the same work I do today, and I have been doing it for over twenty years.
In 2005 I built my own BPO and grew it from two people to a hundred and twenty. I designed the systems it ran on myself. The CRM, the telecoms, the reporting, the call-centre platforms.
I did not advise on those decisions from a distance. I lived every one of them.
And I kept building, because I am the kind of person who builds. A telecoms platform. A web agency that built and hosted sites on its own infrastructure. A full CRM I ran my client work on.
Not every idea I have backed went on to conquer the world. But the building never stopped, and the seeing round corners never stopped, and that has mattered more than any single outcome.
I find where the work is breaking, fix it, and where the fix needs a system, I build the system. Then I make sure it runs without me, and I step back.
I am an operator, not an adviser. I have never had much interest in handing over a report and wishing someone luck.
A while ago I turned the same instinct on myself.
I had put on a lot of weight and developed Stage 2 hypertension, and I reversed all of it. Then I built an app so other people could follow the same path.
Find the problem, fix it, build the thing that makes the fix last. It is how I am wired.
These days I work with founder-led tech and service businesses across the UK, US, Canada, and Asia, where growth has outpaced the operations underneath it.
The founder has become the bottleneck. Half the process lives in people's heads. The tools do not talk to each other.
I find what is broken, fix it, build what needs building, and leave it running. My own business runs on systems I built, which is the simplest proof I can give of how I think.
Fear and excitement tend to feel the same. The only difference is whether you book the flight or stay in the cold.
I booked the flight, and I have not regretted it for a single day since.
You tell me what's breaking in how your business runs.
I listen, ask questions, and tell you honestly whether I can help.
If there's a fix worth making, I'll show you where to start.
We can move on from there.
Whatever's broken is costing you something today. The sooner we find it, the sooner it stops. Thirty minutes, free.