The technology keeps changing. The problem underneath it never does.

Every few years, a new technology arrives and creative businesses get excited. Then confused. Then frustrated. Digital did it. Automation did it. AI is doing it now.

The pattern is always the same. Leadership announces the strategy. Teams are told to adopt the tools. Nobody stops to ask whether the way work actually moves can support what they're trying to do.

That's where I work. Not with the tools. With the system underneath them. I look at how work flows from the moment something lands to the moment it leaves, find the points where it depends too heavily on people to hold it together, and fix those first. The technology comes in after. When it does, it fits, because the foundation is ready.

I've watched this pattern play out across three technology waves now. I don't think it's going to stop repeating itself. I've just got good at recognising it early.

I am not teaching theory. I am redesigning workflows I have run.

I started building websites before most people knew what they were. In 2000, I launched Target Online, a digital consultancy that helped agencies deliver work they'd sold but didn't yet know how to build. Grew it to 100 people. Sold it.

After that, agencies kept asking for the same thing. Not the building. The fixing. Something in how work moved wasn't right, and they needed someone who could see it and sort it out. I kept saying yes.

At one agency, I arrived expecting to run project management. On day 1, they told me the operations director had left suddenly and the job was mine if I wanted it. I said yes. That's been the shape of most of this career: something needs fixing, and I find I can see what's wrong faster than most people expect.

At Engine, I rebuilt how work was scoped, resourced, and tracked. Within a year, 80% of projects were landing on time and on budget. Profit jumped 2 points. By year 2, they were the most profitable part of the group. At Entain, I built Wave Creative from nothing into a 380-person function running campaigns across 4 continents and 27 brands. More than £20 million in combined savings by year 2.

Some of the creative work won awards along the way. It could only happen because someone had sorted out the operations underneath it first.

Those numbers matter. What I actually remember is watching teams stop working harder than they should have to, because someone had finally looked at the system they were working in and changed it.

I don't sit still. I see something and think: I wonder if I could learn that. That instinct is how I built my agency career, and it's still how I work now.

I love it when a plan comes together. Not just the result. The whole process: the diagnosing, the figuring out, the unexpected problem halfway through that forces you to think differently. That's the bit I find genuinely satisfying.

Creative work has always been part of my life, whether that's been in agency environments protecting and delivering other people's creative visions, or outside of work, making things with my hands. I have a pottery studio in my garden and I spend a lot of time in it. There's something about shaping something from scratch, one deliberate step at a time, that feels familiar.