I’m an Executive Director of a group of businesses where I stay very hands-on—especially when it comes to the creative direction. Over the last 20 years, I’ve helped take a business from start-up to a 20,000 square foot business. It’s been a twisting road, full of mistakes, learnings, and a fair bit of stubborn persistence. I studied at the University of Ulster, where the biggest thing I took away was how different marketing looks in the real world—especially for small businesses. The textbooks were thrown away by Professors like David Carson and Audrey Gilmore who at the time were leading research into Marketing in SMEs. I knew I had to embed marketing application and implementation within an SME, so the only way it could be ensured was to create my own. Currently I’m focused on building practical codable agentic systems and frameworks that augment existing linguistic, visual and datafield LLMs so that small businesses can navigate them successfully. We’re working on ways to help SMEs adapt by helping ourselves, not with hype, but with proof of concept tools that they can implement now to stay competitive and sustainable.