I didn’t plan any of this.
That’s the whole point.

The full story

Where this all comes from

The beginning nobody talks about

I didn’t start at a desk. I started at a sink, in the back of a fish restaurant, peeling potatoes for the evening service — and if that sounds like the world’s least glamorous origin story for an AI consultant, you’d be right, but stay with me, because that’s exactly where it begins.

There was something about being in a working kitchen that got under my skin, watching how the whole operation moved, how every role connected to every other role, how the chaos had a logic to it once you knew what you were looking at. I was young and I was paying attention, even when nobody thought I was.

At college, while everyone else was figuring out what they wanted to be, I already knew the answer in broad strokes — I wanted to build something of my own, and I wrote as much, in some throwaway exercise that I can still picture now, the words sitting there on the page with a seriousness I hadn’t quite earned yet. I studied business and marketing, worked through Maslow and Herzberg, learned the difference between the theory of a good organisation and the uncomfortable reality of one, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I started to understand that process — real, lived, sweated-over process — was the thing that separated the businesses that scaled from the ones that stalled.

The professional years nobody tells you about

My first real professional role was at an insurance company, and I want to be honest about how it started: I was filing. Physical documents, alphabetically, in a building that smelled of carpet and bad coffee. But within weeks I’d spotted that nobody had a good answer for why the filing system worked the way it did, applied internally for something more interesting, and found myself running a sub-team migrating physical records into digital systems — which, at the time, felt like genuine frontier work.

I went back and finished university afterwards, produced a business plan for a football coaching agency, wrote my dissertation on business ethics, and then did the thing that most of my peers were too sensible to do. I went to America for a long summer and travelled the East Coast with a kitbag and a coaching role, living on the expense package provided and spending every last cent in Abercrombie & Fitch or the bars of Boston and NYC. Learning that the world was considerably larger, stranger and more full of possibility than the view from Lancashire had suggested just added fuel to my desire to want to be involved in actions that shifted the needle in some way.

Building the first business

My stepfather ran a kitchen showroom, and somewhere in a conversation about margins and stock and what was happening on the internet, I spotted something. Radiators. Not glamorous, I know, but the market was there, the infrastructure was there, and I could see the gap before most people were even looking in that direction.

What followed was fourteen years of building, iterating, failing in small ways and learning from them, then building again. We moved from stocking items to drop shipping, built a brand, developed supplier relationships, watched the market shift toward white-label products mid-decade and shifted with it. I launched a second brand, sourcing direct from overseas factories, navigating the complexity of different cultures and different supply chains, building out both wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels, competing at a national level against operations that had three times our headcount and a fraction of our agility. The procedures had to be right. The processes had to be documented, rehearsed, and refined — because at that scale, the difference between a smooth reorder and a costly stockout is purely a function of whether your systems are working or whether they’re not.

When it gets hard is when it gets interesting

I want to say something about 2020 that I don’t hear enough people say honestly. “Despite the pandemic, I made a few bad decisions too”. I’d committed heavily — time, resource, a serious chunk of money — to getting our SEO position to where it needed to be back in 2019, backed by an ad campaign that was performing, and the return on investment was building when COVID arrived and the drop-ship model took a hit that no amount of good positioning was going to absorb. What I hadn’t left was a big enough buffer for the unexpected.

Here’s the truth about that period: when things are going well, you enjoy it. When they’re not, you grow. That’s not a consolation — it’s a fact. The businesses that come out stronger on the other side of a hard moment are the ones run by people who studied what happened, absorbed it, and carried the lesson forward. Who understood that you can do everything right and still lose — and that the measure of an operator isn’t the setback, it’s what they do next. Every process that broke down, every model that didn’t survive contact with reality, every business decision that looked right on paper and fell apart in practice — those became the most valuable lessons I ever learned. No course, no textbook, and no consultant could have taught me what those years did. I carried all of it forward.

The moment that changed everything

Around 2016, I got close to a property management business that had the same challenge I was starting to see everywhere I looked: a real and widening gap between what the technology could do and what the people running these organisations knew was possible.

Since 2021, I’ve been applying everything I’d spent fifteen years learning about process, efficiency, and iteration to that environment — and the results have been the kind of thing that sounds made-up until you see the actual numbers. AI migrating tens of thousands of documents and thousands of individual pieces of data. Automated systems adding genuine safety nets into operational areas that used to rely entirely on human memory. The pound savings are in the tens of thousands. More importantly, I can now look at growing that business two or three times over without adding proportionate headcount — because the systems hold. That’s when I understood what Consult Beyond was actually for.

Why I do this

I’ve spent a long time in business without being entirely sure where I wanted it to land. When the goal is purely money, that’s all you can think about, and it has a way of narrowing your perspective down to something quite small. But when I started to see what the AI work was actually doing — not just in the numbers, but in the relief on people’s faces when a process that used to take three days took three hours — I understood something about purpose that I hadn’t quite had words for before.

I think about the man who has been running his carpet shop for fifty years. He’s not looking for someone to come in and blow up everything he’s built — he just needs someone to sit down next to him and his son and work through it together, in plain language, at a pace that makes sense for the business they actually have. I think about the online tutor who wants her students to be able to scan up their work and have it reviewed properly and systematically, without her spending every evening doing it by hand.

Those are the problems I find interesting. Not the big enterprise contracts. Not the headline implementations. The real businesses, the ones run by real people, where the right intervention — applied in the right place, at the right moment — genuinely changes what’s possible. That’s why I started Consult Beyond. And that’s the only version of this story I know how to tell.