.png){kind=logo}
The experience behind the work
This wasn’t a career pivot. It was the convergence of what I had already lived.
For two decades I built and led professional services firms under sustained commercial responsibility. At the same time, I was working in environments where pressure had immediate human consequences.
Only later did I see that the foundations of this work had been forming long before I named it.
Addiction, Recovery and Founder Burnout
I started drinking at 14 and got sober at 28. Those years included instability and consequences that landed hard. There were periods where life became difficult to hold together.
Recovery wasn’t dramatic. It was slow rebuilding: discipline, structure, service and accountability, learning to live without escape. That foundation has now held for over 20 years.
The burnout came much later, during the most commercially successful period of my career.
I was leading a firm that had grown from £0 to £6m in five years.
Growth, clients, financials and delivery ultimately rested with me. I loved the pace of it, the volatility, the sense that what we were building genuinely mattered. Carrying responsibility felt natural.
Pressure was familiar, comfortable even.
Until it wasn’t.
At the height of that growth, more and more of it was landing on me. What looked sudden from the outside had been accumulating inside the business for some time. The same traits that had driven success: endurance, intensity and responsibility, began working against me rather than for me.
I tipped into full founder burnout. It affected the business, my health and my relationships.
I Stepped Back in, Differently
I returned to lead the business through Covid and a long M&A process, exiting in 2023 through a management buy-out.
But I knew what it had cost and what needed to change.
That experience shapes this work. I know how isolating it can be. My approach is grounded in founder reality, not theory.
Alongside Business
Alongside building companies, I’ve spent years in places most people never see up close.
In the slums of Delhi, helping establish a men’s initiative.
Leading chaplaincy groups inside a young offender institution with men convicted of serious violence.
With people living through addiction and homelessness when life had narrowed to survival.
.png){kind=icon}
Those environments didn’t teach me theory. They taught me how people behave under sustained pressure.
What Informs My Approach
The Architecture Behind Founder Stabilisation
This work is not improvisation.
It draws on commercial responsibility, recovery, structural thinking and lived burnout.
Those foundations shape how I assess pressure and how I intervene.
I’ve been through full founder burnout myself.
Unless you’ve experienced it, It’s hard to understand the weight of waking exhausted while carrying decisions the business depends on.
Having walked that road, I recognise the signals early - and know how to stabilise founders before the business pays the price.
I’ve carried the load. I’ve built, scaled and exited professional services firms.
I understand utilisation pressure, revenue dependence and how bottlenecks quietly form at the centre of growth.
Fragility often hides inside momentum.
Two decades working and leading in environments shaped by addiction, homelessness and custodial instability taught me containment under volatility.
Calm under pressure. Boundaries that hold. Directness without humiliation.
Founder overload demands the same discipline.
Recovery from addiction teaches you to recognise denial, accept reality and rebuild stability - ground up.
It requires patience, structure and willingness to make difficult decisions long before things feel better.
Those same patterns appear in founder burnout. Stability comes first and everything else follows.
Enterprise transformation teaches you to see organisations as systems – strategy, operating model, technology and people working as one.
When alignment slips, dependency concentrates and complexity compounds long before anything visibly breaks.
Founder burnout needs the same lens: not fixing isolated symptoms, but rebalancing the system around the founder carrying the load.
In £1–10m founder-led businesses, the founder carries strategy, judgement and velocity. When their decision capacity narrows, the business feels it.
This isn’t a wellbeing issue. It’s embedded business exposure.
Founder capacity shouldn’t be treated as a personal trait to rely on. It needs to be designed around.
Clarity protects both sides.
This work isn’t coaching or therapy. It is structured, business-grade stabilisation.
Time-bound, direct and designed to restore decision capacity when business load outpaces the founder carrying it.
I see the founder – and the system they’re carrying.
When a founder is struggling, I look at the founder and the business structure together.
In many founder-led companies the business has simply grown faster than the system supporting it.