I spent years at VMware and Dell EMC before I started consulting, and the pattern I saw inside those businesses is the same one I now see across technical founders every week. Engineering quality and commercial viability are almost entirely …
Startup Consulting for First-Time Founders: What It Actually Does and When You Need It
First-time founders arrive at my desk with one of two problems, and they almost always think they have the other one. The first group believe they have a funding problem and actually have a validation problem. The second group believe …
The Startup Legal Checklist: What UK Founders Need Sorted, and When
Legal admin is the work founders defer most reliably, and the reason is entirely rational: none of it makes the phone ring. Nobody ever won a customer because their shareholders’ agreement was in order. So it waits, and it keeps …
Setting Up Payroll for the First Time: A UK Founder’s Guide
The first payroll run is the moment a business stops being a founder with an idea and becomes an employer with obligations. Most founders arrive at it having thought hard about the hire and almost not at all about the …
Bootstrapping Your Startup: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs
Most founders who come to me about bootstrapping their startup arrive carrying the same quiet assumption: that building without external funding is the path you take when you cannot get investment, rather than a deliberate strategy in its own right. …
How to Name Your Business: A Practical Guide
Every week, I speak to a founder who has spent three months agonising over their business name while everything else — their market research, their financial model, their first customer conversations — sits untouched. And every week I speak to …
SGI vs Techstars: Mentorship, Equity, and What UK Founders Are Really Choosing Between
A Leeds healthtech founder told me he was choosing between Techstars and us because, in his words, “both of you help with mentoring and getting funded.” He had read the Techstars pitch about a network of mentors and a path …
SGI vs Y Combinator: Which Is Right for a UK Founder Raising Their First Round?
A Manchester-based SaaS founder asked me last year whether she should apply to Y Combinator or work with us. She had a working product, a handful of paying customers, and interest from two UK angels. She assumed the two options …
SGI vs Seedcamp: Why This Is Not the Either-Or Decision Founders Think It Is
A founder building a fintech tool in London asked me whether she should “go with SGI or go with Seedcamp.” She had framed it as a fork in the road, two doors leading to the same place by different routes. …
The Complete UK Startup Ecosystem Guide: How to Navigate Britain’s Support Landscape
The UK has one of the strongest startup support ecosystems outside Silicon Valley: numerous government-backed schemes, well over a hundred accelerators and incubators, and a deep layer of business support organisations. And yet most founders I work with tap into …