About

At university, I studied and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Sports Management, then went on to do an MA in International Marketing Management.
The idea was to combine the two and work in sports marketing. On and offline.
How times have changed.

Along the way, I gradually leaned towards SEO and everything connected to it. From working at a digital marketing agency to going in-house, from a small local homeware company to an international fashion brand, I've covered a fair bit of ground. That gave me a decent view of different industries, and access to some genuinely sharp people.

Somewhere in there I also got involved with the WordPress community: speaking at events about WordPress SEO, selling my services to other businesses, and eventually organising some of the major WordPress events.

But something nagged at me in the later years of full-time work. On the side, I'd always enjoyed helping people manage their sites while still working full-time. Doing that kept sharpening my WordPress skills, and eventually gave me the confidence to start my own business, back in July 2016. I helped entrepreneurs and small businesses grow their online visibility, audience engagement and conversions.

I'm proud of what came out of that. Profitable, consistent cashflow, and real growth for the companies I worked with. One US-based SaaS company I worked with on growth and conversion strategy saw 55% year-on-year revenue growth while maintaining a 38% EBITDA. That company was eventually acquired for a $1.2 billion valuation.

That run lasted five years, until a personal trauma and a few other things happening at once made me stop and properly reconsider whether to carry on. In the end, I didn't, and I went back into full-time employment in 2021 as a Digital Experience Manager.

I found my way back to some of that entrepreneurial energy by starting a social enterprise around web accessibility, called PurpleByte. Combining lived experience with knowledge of the digital industry, and some public speaking on accessibility, made it feel like the natural next step.

Unfortunately, PurpleByte wasn't sustainable, so I closed it down.

Since then, I've been made redundant again, and started again, again. This time with Untangli, helping founders sort out the operational side of their business: the unglamorous plumbing that quietly makes or breaks everything else.

If there's a theme running through all of this, it's that I've never really stayed in one lane. Sports marketing, SEO, digital experience, accessibility, business ownership. I used to think that made me behind, like I should have specialised by now. I've come round to thinking it's closer to an asset: reading the whole board rather than guarding one square of it. I have written more about that shift in a post about trusting the process, if you want the longer version.

Where exactly this all lands, I'm still working out. But this site is where I'll be doing that thinking out loud, alongside whatever I pick up along the way about business, tech, operations and the seams between them.

And you can get started by going to the articles section.