Most UK startups and scale-ups are not short of marketing activity. They are short of marketing that connects to revenue. Campaigns run, content gets published, and budgets get spent, but without senior strategic oversight, it is difficult to know what is actually working and why.
TL;DR: Practical insights on marketing strategy, AI search, leadership, and growth for UK startups and scale-ups that need more than generic advice.
Your marketing is either growing the business or it isn’t. For most UK startups and scale-ups, the honest answer is somewhere uncomfortable in the middle: activity is happening, but nobody with the seniority to connect it to revenue is in the room. Hiring a full-time Chief Marketing Officer feels like the logical fix. Then you […]
Across 2025, I’ve spoken with leaders working at the intersection of technology, people, infrastructure and purpose. What’s stayed with me isn’t just what they’re building, but how they’re approaching it. In cybersecurity, conversations with Riverside Court Consulting Ltd and Bryan Altimas reframed how I think about security altogether. Less as a technical safeguard, more as
The People and Organisations Behind the Conversations Read More »
Another brilliant conversation last week, this time with Liberty Venn, the founder of the Children’s Book Project’s. Within minutes it becomes clear why this charity has grown into one of the most effective literacy movements in the country. Liberty combines purpose with practicality. She is building something simple, scalable and profoundly needed. The challenge she
Building a Movement, One Book at a Time Read More »
For most of my career, I thought resilience was about pushing through.Absorbing more. Coping quietly. Getting on with things because that’s what the role demanded. And if I’m honest, that belief shaped how I led my teams too. I valued people who could “power on”.I praised those who took on more.I treated resilience as stamina,
Leadership Resilience Read More »
AI investment is rising at extraordinary speed. Anyone watching the sector closely will have seen the same pattern across forecasts from Gartner, IDC, Deloitte and others. The world is not easing into the AI era. It is sprinting. Gartner expects global spending on AI technologies to reach roughly one point five trillion dollars in 2025.
AI Investment Is Surging, but the Real Story Lies in What Could Slow It Down Read More »
Over recent week’s I have spent time speaking with Hermione Thomas, the founder of TeachBack, and it is clear she has built something valuable in the education space. A solution that is practical, fair, and genuinely needed. Teacher recruitment in the UK remains one of the hardest operational challenges for school leaders. Agency fees can
Smarter Recruitment. Stronger Schools Read More »
Adobe’s agreement to acquire Semrush for 1.9 billion dollars has landed with a mix of surprise, curiosity and scepticism across the marketing and technology worlds. On paper, it is a straightforward deal. Adobe adds a well known SEO and digital visibility platform to its marketing suite. SEMRush gains a deep pocketed owner with enterprise distribution.
Adobe’s SEMRush Acquisition: Strategic Vision or Expensive Misdirection Read More »
Why cost cutting without operational improvement creates fragility, not strength. There is a version of being “lean” that makes an organisation sharper, faster and more focused. And then there is the version we are starting to see more often as we head towards 2026, the one where businesses quietly hollow themselves out while believing they
The Wrong Kind of Lean: How Companies Shrink Themselves Into Weakness Read More »
For the past two decades, the internet has revolved around movement. You search on Google, click a result, land on a website, maybe share it on Facebook or TikTok, and if you’re a marketer, you measure the journey in impressions, reach, and conversions. Traffic has been the heartbeat of the digital economy, the universal signal
Beyond the Click: How AI Browsers Are Quietly Rewriting the Internet Read More »
Search is changing faster than most brands realise. According to McKinsey & Company, AI is now “the new front door to the internet”. More than half of Google searches already include AI summaries, expected to reach 75% by 2028. That means your customer may get everything they need without ever clicking through to your site.
Rewiring Discovery: How AI Is Changing the Way We’re Found Read More »