Work & Ideas

I am seeing more business consultants than ever. While I am sure there are good ones out there, I have never encountered one that actually delivered on what they promised. It is interesting to note that the majority share the same origin story: they were running a company, turning over £5,000,000 a year, they exited, and now, for just £1,000 […]

Following my previous post on why agencies should prioritise “good enough,” I had a conversation regarding the importance of founders having a “passion” for their work. The argument is that you need to love what you do to survive in the long term. My view is the opposite: the last person who should start a business is someone with a

I have been weighing two opposing approaches to business: the pursuit of the “very best” versus the pursuit of the “optimised.” In the creative and agency world, the default setting is to strive for the highest possible standard in every video, design, or build. I’ve decided that for the vast majority of cases, this is a strategic error. The most

In 2024, we ran a six-month experiment. We posted every day across LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. We followed the “best practice” playbook: we tracked engagement, varied the content, and built a workflow that produced daily videos and images. The results on paper were great. Followers increased. Engagement went up. People I met at networking events mentioned they’d seen the

In ten years of running agencies and businesses, I’ve seen every model there is. The one that sticks out like a sore thumb, and the one I avoid at all costs, is the “Big Client” trap. Unless you are in a highly specialised manufacturing niche where that’s just the nature of the gig, having one or two customers represent the

In 2025, Alex Clarke and I launched Comus. After years of navigating the events industry and seeing how bloated software platforms operate, we realised there was a gap for something that actually worked for the organiser, not just the middleman. What is Comus? Comus is an event management platform built for one purpose: to make selling tickets and marketing events

I started Yazaroo in 2015 with a bit of help from The Prince’s Trust and a lot of cups of tea. Back then, I was just trying to prove that you could build a digital agency that didn’t rely on fluff and jargon. Ten years later, we’ve moved through offices in Albury Park, Cranleigh, and now Farnham, and the core

With The Fifth launching soon, and knowing you can’t actually see the platform yet, I wanted to document the “why” behind the brand. I’m not going to bore you with every technical detail. It’s better to let you see it for yourself. But here is some food for thought. Who is this for? This is a marketplace for the person

If you look at the “official” way to start a business, it’s all about the pitch deck. You’re supposed to show five-year projections, market analysis, and a bulletproof business plan. But in 2018, when I decided to go into business with Neil Phillipson, I didn’t have a deck. I didn’t even really have a plan. What I had was a

Of all the things I care about when running a business, productivity is right at the top of the list, second only to cash flow. The two are closely linked. If the cash is flowing, profit can usually be found through productivity. Doing more with less. Running lean. Removing friction. Automating everything that doesn’t need a human brain involved. That’s

Do we actually need offices in 2026? Or has the world of work become more nomadic, more fluid, and frankly more sensible? From my experience, the value of having a dedicated office with your entire team sat in it full time has massively diminished. That doesn’t mean offices are useless. It means the old assumption, that serious work only happens

For well over a decade, I’ve been telling business owners the same thing: the best way to drive traffic to your website is through blogging. Specifically, by posting authoritative, SEO-optimised content targeted at the search terms your market uses when they have a problem you can solve. This isn’t new, nor is it radical. It’s boring, repetitive, and slow, but

We’re thinking about building reviews into Comus. The idea is simple: if you buy a ticket to an event, you get a link a week later asking you to review it. Like Etsy or eBay, where you review the seller rather than the product, our system would let people review the venue or event organiser based on their experience. This

I find networking to be hit and miss. Mostly miss. The best networking I’ve ever done has never been labelled as networking. It’s been meeting like-minded business owners while doing something else entirely. Shared activity first, business second. Organised breakfast meetings, on the other hand, tend to attract people with nothing better to do. A cheap breakfast. A forced smile.

Bundles are a great way to sell services. They simplify what can otherwise be a confusing offering, and they’re good for business because they naturally create opportunities for upsell. But in my experience, there’s a right way to sell bundles and a wrong way to sell bundles. Bundles Work for Products, Not Bespoke Services McDonald’s famously popularised the idea of

People really don’t know what’s good for them. I tell clients all the time: use a password manager, and make every password unique and complex. Do they listen? Rarely. Put simply, about 60% of people whose passwords I know are neither unique nor complex. At Comus, we handle sensitive data for every partner we onboard. Some sell thousands of tickets.

I made a deliberate decision not to include images in this journal. Here are the reasons why: I’m a designer Most of my day-to-day work is visual. I spend my time building brands, designing products, and thinking about how things look and feel. I don’t need this space to do more of that. This journal is for thinking Once images

I have a good friend who has run a lot of businesses. He’s probably one of the smartest people I know. He’s interesting for a lot of reasons, but mainly because he gives excellent business advice. Not because he’s good at business, but because he’s failed at almost everything. I have never met anyone who has started, run, and failed

We built Comus from the ground up with a lot of things hard-coded and designed simply to work, not to follow best practice. That was deliberate. The goal was to get something live, prove the concept, and see if the model stacked up. And it did. It worked. If you want the background, you can read more about Comus here.

The Agency Obsession With “Big” In the agency world, there’s a constant undercurrent of pressure to be servicing bigger clients, more famous clients, growing your team, and dealing with bigger budgets. Every agency event I’ve ever been to is punctuated with the same questions:How big is your team now?Who are you working for? These are almost always followed by the

As a brand guy, I’ve registered a few trademarks and I’ve advised clients on registering trademarks with the UK Intellectual Property Office. So when it came to registering Comus as a trademark, it felt obvious that I should just get on with it myself. I paid the £170, submitted the application, and considered it done. It was only after submitting

What a year. It was important, it was difficult, and it was uneven. Yazaroo 2025 was a proper rollercoaster for us. When work came in, it hit hard; when it didn’t, everything went quiet. Most people in marketing had a tough year, between AI disruption and general economic gloom; demand was patchy. But despite that, we hit an all-time high

As part of my overhaul of Yazaroo’s services and positioning heading into 2026, I’m launching Yazaroo Ventures: a deliberate strategy for working with startups. It began with Kani.House in 2018. I built the brand, website, digital, print, video, marketing – everything except the product – in exchange for equity. It worked well, and until the project wound down in 2025,

For 10 years we have provided web design, hosting, website support, graphic design, brand design and print. We have since added to this typeface design, SEO, and PPC. I have made the decision that starting Q1. 2026, we will offer a reduced service line of web design, WordPress support, web hosting and search marketing. The reason being is very simple,