Four generations of my family sold baby strollers. I’m the fourth.
I didn’t grow up dreaming about it. I don’t obsess over fabrics, wheels, or suspension systems. But I understood exactly what parents needed — and why. And that understanding shaped everything about how I think about the work I do now.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About Doing Good Work
The best people in any field aren’t necessarily the ones who love the work itself.
They’re the ones who deeply respect the people they serve.
A great surgeon doesn’t love cutting. They love giving people their life back. A great teacher doesn’t love grading papers. They love watching someone understand something for the first time.
The work is the vehicle. The person it serves is the point.
What I Actually Care About
I don’t love operations in the abstract. I love what happens when operations work.
I love watching a founder stop putting out fires every day. I love seeing a team that used to miss every deadline start shipping on time, consistently. I love the moment a business owner looks at their week and realises they finally have space to think.
Operations creates that space. And that’s worth caring about deeply.
Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Have It
Most small businesses can’t afford a full-time COO. A senior operations leader runs £150K–£250K a year. That’s outside the budget of any business doing under $5M.
So the founder fills the gap. They handle strategy, sales, client delivery, hiring, admin, and operations simultaneously — and none of it gets the attention it deserves.
The result? Great ideas that stall. Talented teams that underperform. Businesses that should be scaling but feel permanently stuck.
It’s not a talent problem. It’s a structure problem.
Why I Do This Work
The same mindset I carried from strollers carries into operations consulting.
Parents deserve products that make a hard job easier, not harder. Entrepreneurs deserve the same — systems that support their vision rather than fight against it. Too many great founders are running on duct tape and willpower when they should have a proper operating system underneath them.
That’s the gap I work in. Not because I have a passion for spreadsheets, but because entrepreneurs are the ones building things that matter. They deserve the infrastructure to actually succeed.
What This Means for Your Business
If your business is running on you personally — your memory, your relationships, your ability to hold it all together — that’s not a business. It’s a dependency.
You need structure. Not because it’s exciting, but because it’s what gets you out from under the chaos and back to doing the work you actually built this for.
The first step is understanding where the gaps are. The OS Readiness Score does exactly that — a free assessment that gives you a clear picture of your operating system in under five minutes.