I started by building the thing myself. That never really left.

I came into commerce early, when a product page was something you wrote by hand and a conversion problem was something you fixed yourself. That start matters: I learned the mechanics of trading, acquisition, merchandising and customer behaviour before I ever had a team, a budget or a board to answer to.

Over twenty-five years the work widened — trading, marketing, analytics, CRM, customer experience, technology, operating models, international growth, data and now AI. What did not change was the interest in how the parts connect. Most businesses do not have a strategy problem or a technology problem. They have a joining problem.

So the work became transformation: sitting with a board on where value should come from, then staying long enough to build the proposition, the team, the operating model, the partners and the platform that actually deliver it. I have built an international commerce business from nothing, and I have helped scale a global one. Both taught the same lesson — the system around the idea decides whether the idea earns anything.

I am equally comfortable in a board pack and in a trading review, and I am usually more useful in the second. Detail is not beneath strategy; it is where strategy is proved or lost.