The Ideas Lab London

I write books and mentor people on creating a business they love from scratch, fixing a business that is no longer working for them, or scaling something in a way that is sustainable and meaningful.

I grew up without any of the natural skills required for entrepreneurship: sales, marketing, focus, persistence, optimism, and yet somehow I've managed to make it work. Now I'm passionate about helping other people like me make a living doing something they really care about.

Many of my clients want a business that is meaningful and allows them creative expression just as much as they want to make money out of it. I get it because I am the same.

Follow me for advice on marketing, social media, writing books, running launches, creating successful offers, and closing sales without manipulation plus some creative inspiration, occasional thoughts on the near future and a sprinkling of amusing memes.

Owner

Deloitte

Head of a Digital Media and Media Asset Management consultancy team at Deloittes.

Joined because I thought it would make my CV look good. Ironically it just made me never want to have a job ever again for the rest of my life (which I have so far succeeded in keeping to).

Tried to sell hugely expensive consulting to broadcasters around what was then a new technology (Media Asset Management). Given the benefits weren't properly proven yet on said new technology no one wanted to pay Deloitte a fortune just to consult on it.

So I quit to consult independently to the BBC and other broadcasters - making me a lot cheaper to hire and getting me paid a lot more. Everybody wins (including Deloitte who were probably pretty sick of me at that point).

Senior Managing Consultant

Citria / Protege 

European technology consultancy supplying systems integration and ebusiness solutions for clients such as ebookers, BBC and Barclaycard. Pioneered solutions for online video including searchable video, Media Asset Management, multi-platform content publishing for broadcasters.

I loved working at a company full of passionate, friendly people at a critical moment in the dot com boom. It felt like the online world was evolving so fast, news stories would change in the course of just a few hours.

At one point I was leading a team of 15 people despite having no discernible management skills. 

I got to play with exciting new technologies and proselytise about the near future where every media company would produce content in multiple formats for multiple platforms. 

Unfortunately the company did not survive the dot com crash and 9/11.

CTO Digital Media Division

Avid Technology

Software developer on special effects products Illusion and Matador for the Parallax division of Avid.

Provided onsite support and development for Disney Feature Animation in Los Angeles during creation of “Dinosaur” movie with Avid’s collaborative production tools.

Parallax was a small company full of lovely people who were annoyingly also geniuses. My software development pinnacle was writing some multi-threaded code to get video into a Silicon Graphics computer off a remote-controlled digital betacam tape. 

But I was wondering at the time what I really wanted to do with my life. I looked around and thought a) I will never be as good a programmer as the others here and b) I don't think I really want to be.

Anyway Avid Technology who owned us went and bought our main competitor and said we either needed to go live in Montreal or take redundancy. Montreal is a cool city (well, bloody freezing actually in the winter) but the option to strike out on my own with a bit of redundancy cash as cushion was too tempting so I went off to freelance for a time.

R&D Engineer

Omnibus Systems

One of the original 3 developers who created the first version of the Omnibus System which went on to control TV stations all over the world.

When I left college I didn't really want a job but it hadn't yet crossed my mind I could work for myself. I saw an advert for this job stuck on the wall at the Uni and it said they were a small company making technology for television and I thought that sounded interesting.

I ended up joining a company founded by a couple of guys who had real creative flair in technology plus a few personality flaws. Back then I was pretty weird anyway so I'm sure I was no picnic to work with but the result was a fairly unhealthy working culture. We managed to produce some ground-breaking stuff despite this.

I look back on writing a bezier-rendering routine in assembler and can't help be impressed at myself.

When the BBC bought our system to control the whole of a TV studio in TV Centre using touch screens (20 years before the iPad was invented) it was quite a moment. Omnibus caught on and the company expanded quickly.

Software Engineer

I help people turn their ideas & expertise into #1 businesses, books and brands. I'm author of 3 bestselling books translated into 10 languages.

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