I’ve been the operator you are right now.
Twenty years building and running businesses, fifteen of them my own. I build the systems that change what a business is worth, then stay until they pay back.
Based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Working with founder-led businesses everywhere.
The path.
I started out recruiting, and found the thing I was best at was the systems that made the recruiting work without me. Everything since has been that, done on purpose.
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Recruitment
Twenty years in business, fifteen of them running my own, starting in recruitment
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2016, Bolt Search
Founded and built for the best part of a decade, until the systems mattered more than the recruiting
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FATP and a bakery
A training provider marketplace that runs itself, and a new operating model for a growing food business
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March 2024, Leanpreneur
A name for what I was becoming: lean, leveraged businesses with old-fashioned business sense
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April 2026, AFCS
The operating system my own businesses now run on, overnight
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June 2026, Thomsett Lockey
An M&A partnership built on deal intelligence
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Now
Building the systems that change what a business is worth, and the room for operators doing it themselves
Build. Advise. Teach.
One operator across many lines of work, each run lean, with education running through most of them.
Build
Systems that run.
- Custom builds
Systems built inside other businesses, from deal intelligence to a value creation index.
- How I run
AFCS, the operating system behind my own businesses.
- Airspace
Search and AI-visibility intelligence across my own estate of websites.
- Find a Training Provider and Boltjobs
UK platforms in training and recruitment, built to run lean.
Advise
Advice, boards, partnerships.
- AI advice and consulting
For founders who want a straight view on what is worth building.
- The Satori Partnership
Principal, working with the recruitment sector.
- SIAS
Board advisor at the end-point assessment organisation for science and engineering apprenticeships.
- Fledglings
Board member at Fledglings, life skills for schools, colleges and providers.
Teach
Rooms and programmes.
- The Leanpreneur Community
The room for operators running their own business lean.
- Stripe Community Newcastle
I host the Newcastle chapter, a room for founders in the North East.
Where they meet
The work that sits across them.
- Thomsett Lockey
Build and advise: my M&A partnership, buying, selling and preparing businesses for exit.
- The Growth Company
Advise and teach: a partnership with The Growth Company.
- ROI for AI Bootcamp
Build and teach: co-led with Andy Bate at The Performance Academy.
- Fractional partner
All three: an operator inside the business, building, advising and teaching the team.
Keep the operator.
Build the capability, and keep the person who owns the outcome. The businesses that get this right will be the ones that built capability around AI, on fundamentals that already worked, rather than the ones that bought the most of it.
AI may automate, accelerate or augment. It must never replace the operator who owns the outcome.
- Business fundamentals first.
- Technology second. Sometimes the fix is software. Often it is stopping something, or redrawing who owns a decision.
- Build first, subscribe later.
- Own your tools where you can. Subscriptions are rented leverage.
- One operator, in the room.
- No project manager or gatekeeper between you and the work. Decisions move at the speed of the conversation.
- Lean is the future.
- Small teams with the right systems now run at the scale of companies many times their size.