Solve the system, not the symptom.
I take senior technical, operating and commercial roles inside founder-led commerce companies: the systems, the integrations, the automation, the AI layer, and the P&L that shows whether any of it is working. The aim is enterprise value: a business that scales without breaking, and is worth more because of how it runs. Home turf: multi-entity commerce across the US, Canada and the UK, tax included: state sales tax, GST/QST/HST and VAT, on stacks from QuickBooks and Xero to NetSuite and Odoo. I'm an operator, not a career consultant. The systems on this page run live businesses today, including my own.
Success-based fees/Two client seats/Waitlist when full
Your operations grew. Your systems didn't.
The stock count and the books disagree by forty units and nobody knows which is right. Month-end drags into week two. Wholesale orders wait on someone remembering to check a portal. Every new channel added a tool, and every tool added another reconciliation.
The standard fixes make it worse: a hire doing manually forever what should have been automated once, or an agency that ships a deck and leaves before the invoices post wrong.
None of that is a people problem. It is a systems problem, and it compounds quietly until a big order, a big partner or a big month exposes it.
That is the job I take on: the administrative, legal and operational risk off your desk, so you and the team can go win clients, price better and drive more dollars through a business built to take it.
Senior technical, operating and commercial leadership, without the full-time seat.
Fractional CTO
Own the technical estate: the decisions, the vendors, the architecture, the roadmap.
- Platform and architecture calls: build vs buy, replatform vs repair, and whether you need an ERP at all yet
- Platform ownership from spreadsheets up: QuickBooks, Xero, Shopify, Amazon, NetSuite, Odoo, 3PL, EDI
- Vendor and agency selection, with the incentives named
- The growth stack too: analytics, email and SMS lifecycle, SEO and paid platforms
- AI systems designed with governance, not bolted on
Fractional COO
Make the operation predictable: measured, reconciled and run on exceptions.
- Order-to-cash, from intake through fulfilment, invoice, payment and close
- Logistics that hold margin: 3PL selection and integration, carrier and freight strategy, inventory and lot discipline
- Global sourcing and supply: suppliers and lead times, landed cost, duties and cross-border freight
- Monthly close cadence and channel-level margin visibility
- Indirect-tax discipline: state sales tax and nexus in the US, GST/QST/HST in Canada, VAT in the UK
- Remote-first design: entities, teams, scorecards and an operating rhythm that runs without an office
Business and P&L advisory
Read the business the way a buyer would: margin quality, predictability, and what the operation is worth.
- Full P&L and margin analysis: contribution by channel, pricing, cost structure
- Quick margin wins first: the found money in pricing, freight, fees and tax that pays for the rest
- Cash, scenario planning and decision support before money is committed
- Enterprise-value focus: diversification, predictability, systems a buyer can trust
- Tax-aware structures: US nexus, GST/QST/HST, VAT, and what the setup costs you
- Scaling plans that name the constraint and sequence the fix
AI operations layer
AI to move the business to its next level of operation: an agent layer over the stack you already have, watching the seams where businesses leak.
- AI as the builder, not the dependency: wherever possible, AI writes deterministic automation that runs without it, so core operations never inherit rising per-token costs
- Daily automated health checks across every integration
- Exception-based monitoring: stale orders, silent failures, drift
- Automated digests and triage that hand people exceptions, not busywork
- Approval gates, kill switches and audit trails as standard: the same guardrail discipline I run on my own live-money trading systems
- NetSuite
- Odoo
- QuickBooks
- Xero
- Zoho
- Shopify
- Amazon
- Faire
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Wise
- Celigo
- Klaviyo
- Google Ads
- Meta Ads
How an engagement runs.
Learn the business, then audit the system as it actually is.
It starts under NDA. I learn the business properly: online research, questions specific to your operation, and a full P&L review. Then an evidence-backed pass through the systems, data flows and failure modes, with observed defects kept strictly separate from assumption and opinion. You get findings you can hand to any implementer, including one who isn't me.
Rank the work by impact, effort and dependency.
A sequenced plan with decision gates, so you can stop at any stage and still have captured value. We agree the baseline and the measure of success here, before any build starts. Forecasts are stated as ranges with the assumptions visible.
Build modular, logged and tested.
Automation is replayed against historical data before it touches production. Guardrails go in first: approval gates, hard limits, kill switches, audit trails.
Operate on exceptions, not heroics.
Monitoring that treats silence as a problem, not a pass. Stale work surfaces itself. A weekly cadence keeps the system honest after I've stepped back, and the measures from step two prove whether the improvement held.
Built, shipped and running.
● Live
An ERP-centred operating layer for multi-channel commerce
- System
- A commerce operation selling through marketplace, DTC, retail and distribution channels, two entities across the US and Canada, with a single ERP as the source of truth and fulfilment through integrated 3PL warehouses.
- Mechanics
- Order-to-cash automated end to end: custom scripts for billing and lot assignment, orders flowing to the 3PL without manual touch, freight rules applied automatically, and a day-by-day monthly close.
- Net effect
- Two countries and multiple channels run daily, entirely remotely, by a small founder-led team, with routine work handled by the system and exceptions handed to people.
● Live · since May 2026
An agent layer that watches the seams
- System
- A portfolio of purpose-built AI agents over a live business stack: integration health, order-pipeline lifecycle, error triage and executive-priority monitoring.
- Mechanics
- Daily green/red status across 10+ integrations, with "no signal" treated as a failure rather than a pass. Every active order knows its pipeline stage and next expected signal; anything stale surfaces as an exception. Script-error triage cut from roughly 30 minutes of context-hunting to seconds.
- Net effect
- Months of unattended scheduled runs producing daily operational digests, governed by approval gates and audit trails.
2026 · UK
Audit to board-ready strategy for a UK contract-catering group
- System
- Engaged on a single underperforming page; expanded into a category-leadership review covering search, interface quality, competitive position and online reputation.
- Mechanics
- Live-site and competitor audit, evidence separated from assumption, then a 22-page two-quarter transformation proposal spanning brand and demand, AI-enabled kitchen operations, and fair site-performance management, with every forecast stated as a planning range.
- Net effect
- From first look to board-ready investment case in 48 hours, including the platform architecture and compliance requirements to execute it.
The person behind it.
I co-founded a consumer products company in 2020 and still run its operations, supply chain, finance, technology and marketing day to day: two entities across the US and Canada, operated entirely remotely. The systems on this page are the ones running it. Before that I spent a decade in multi-location retail operations, including helping scale a repair chain from six locations to fifty.
Consulting gets a deliberately small slice of my week. I take it on because I like business itself: the mechanics, the numbers, the moment a fix holds. Alongside client work I advise investors and operators on commerce operations through expert networks such as Dialectica. Two client seats keep that work serious without pulling focus from my own company. British and Canadian, with working years behind me in England, the US, Colombia and continental Europe, I run everything remotely.
How I take on work.
Success-based, agreed against a baseline.
Engagements are structured around results, not hours. The first call is free. The diagnostic is a fixed fee, agreed up front. Ongoing work is priced against the baseline set in the diagnostic, with the fee formula fixed before any build starts. If the improvement can't be measured, I won't price it as if it could.
Only work I can improve and prove.
I take an engagement when I'm confident there's a measurable result to reach. That is what the paid, fixed-fee diagnostic is for: the advice is the product, not the pitch. If I can't see the path, I decline and say why, and you keep the findings either way.
You get my bench, not just me.
Some jobs need a specialist rather than a generalist: tax counsel, customs, legal, niche developers. I refer into a network of professionals I already trust, and I say plainly when a piece of work isn't mine to do.
Two seats, then a waitlist.
My own company comes first, and client work gets the part of my week I can protect. That caps it at two companies at a time. When both seats are taken, new engagements join a waitlist. It is not first come, first served: I take the work where the fit is right, the value is largest and the problem looks like fun, and I'll tell you honestly where you stand.
As of September 2026: eleven companies on the waitlist, one engagement under evaluation.
Where I'm useful, and where I'm not.
A good fit
- Founder-led company where operations have outgrown the systems underneath them
- You're building toward an exit, a raise or a step change in scale
- Multi-channel commerce, multi-entity or cross-border structures, or an operation drowning in spreadsheets and manual reconciliation
- You want AI working in the business, with governance, not a demo
- You want the flaw in the plan named before it costs you
A poor fit
- You want a dev shop to staff a ticket queue
- You want guaranteed outcomes; I price against measured results, not promises
- You've already decided and want a consultant to agree
- The problem is a pitch deck, not an operation
I want rigorous thinking, not agreeable thinking, and I assume you do too. If an idea has a flaw I'll name it. If there's a better alternative it goes on the table before we commit.
Start with the system that hurts.
Email a short description of the operation and where it leaks: the reconciliation that never closes, the channel held together by one person, the integration nobody trusts. The first conversation is free and direct, and an NDA comes before anything sensitive. The diagnostic that follows is paid, fixed-fee work, and you keep the findings either way. If I'm not the right person for it, I'll say so. If both seats are taken, you'll get a straight answer on timing. The waitlist runs on fit, not first come, first served.