You're the Most Expensive
Firefighter in Your Company

Every SME hits the same wall. In the early days, your involvement in everything was the advantage. You were faster, sharper, closer to the detail than anyone else. That's how you built it.

But the business kept growing, and now that same involvement is the bottleneck. You're the one people wait for, the one who untangles the miscommunication, the one answering emails at ten o'clock at night. Not because you want to, but because the systems underneath haven't caught up with the business on top.

This is what I call operational drag: the invisible friction that builds up when a business scales faster than its architecture. It's not a people problem and it's not a time management problem. It's a structural one. And until you fix it, every new tool you add, AI included, just makes the mess louder.

I founded and scaled Profusion, one of the UK's first data science consultancies. I've sat on advisory boards, been a regular technology pundit on BBC World News, and led AI transformation programmes for the John Lewis Partnership and Carlsberg Britvic.

Escape Velocity is where I bring everything I've learned to the leaders who need it most: the ones running the businesses that actually make this country work.