Portfolio
What the gap costs
One sale. One Saturday. The maths that made me build my own.
One sale. One Saturday. The maths that made me build my own.
It’s only a few seconds.A well-known POS vendor, pitching to me
Their till wanted a table selected before every sale. Tap, scroll, tap. Five to ten presses to enter a twenty pound note. A processing animation. A very nice animation for the change. A tap to dismiss it. Your login code again. A pause while the menu reloaded.
I asked why any of that was necessary. They dismissed the question. Nobody in that room had ever worked a Saturday, or considered that this industry earns its money in a very small number of hours, and that wasted seconds are the whole game.
One server has half an hour to put through a hundred drinks. That’s eighteen seconds each, including pouring them. Add thirty seconds of till to every sale and you don’t serve a hundred, you serve sixty. Forty lost drinks, about £280 off one server in one peak half hour. Every bar in the building, every Friday and Saturday, before you’ve paid the software subscription.
That conversation is why I built my own. It’s also why I’m worth having in the room before decisions like that get made.
A three-site group in Manchester: bookings printed every morning and re-keyed into a spreadsheet, reservations invisible on the till, takings separated by hand, a VAT return that took a month. I replaced the EPOS, overhauled bookings, repointed the domains and fixed the mail that had been silently failing.
1 afternoon
Tips ran at £250 a month and nobody treated it as a product problem. I tested where the prompt appeared, the wording, amount versus percentage, when it fired, and what the server said out loud. The winning version puts the script on the server’s screen before the customer sees anything.
£2,500/mo
In iZettle’s first UK years a select group of retailers was invited to bring shop-floor reality into an EPOS being designed from scratch. Small sessions, real change. The earliest version of the work I love doing.
Joined the family retail business from school and built its systems from nothing: EPOS, CMS and multi-channel e-commerce. Among the first hundred broadcasters on YouTube Live, running a weekly show from the shop floor for two years. Sold to a PLC competitor.
£800k to £9mThousands of live listings, past what the platform’s tooling could handle, so I wrote my own listing software in Visual Basic.
Worked with the UK’s largest car parts distributor to improve sales and efficiency on over six hundred thousand SKUs.
600k SKUsAdvisory projects with iZettle, eBay and Argos; including shop-floor sessions with iZettle’s team in its first UK years, and work on eBay’s Argos Click & Collect launch, later deployed across my own client base.
800 storesHelping retailers list at scale across multiple websites and platforms, well past what the native tooling could handle.
Hundreds of thousands of leads from TV advertising, into a case system running on Windows NT. I built the bridge in the middle. Still running, essentially untouched, on retainer.
11 years liveTook ownership of the Preston venue after four years on its entertainment and management team.
Order-to-table, built during lockdown and given away free. Sixteen hundred UK venues onboarded, my largest in Australia. I built and supported nearly all of it myself while working as a host in our own venues.
1,600 venues
Began opening new venues with a view to consolidating the market locally.
7 venues
Built the tech behind the viral toilet disco button, with millions of views on TikTok.
The platform our group runs on launches into beta: till, stock, table management, tiered loyalty, reporting and payroll export. It carries the full trade of seven venues including a nightclub on a Saturday, and a hand-picked few other businesses now run on it.
£6m annual trade
Launched across the group, increasing bookings and ticket sales across the multi-venue estate.
Putting twenty years of operating and building to work for other people: interim, fractional and advisory, on either side of the hospitality technology gap.
I can help. Work out what we’re making and why, set the direction, then hold the team to it. I read the code myself, so nobody can hide behind an estimate.
I can help. In the boardroom, in the roadmap meeting, or one to one as a mentor to the people building it. A second opinion from someone who has run the venues and written the software.
I can help. You don’t have to rip everything out. Keep what works, replace what doesn’t, build the bridge in between.
I can help. At the bar, at the table and online. Every step between a customer and their order has a price, and I can tell you what it is because I’ve paid it.
I can help. Most operators never touch their defaults. The settings go in on day one and nobody revisits them. That’s usually where the easiest money is sitting.
I can help. A technical review, written down: codebase, version control, infrastructure, server setup, backups and disaster recovery. What’s solid, what’s fragile, what to fix first. It’s often the first step of a bigger job, and sometimes the report is the job. How the review works →
Preston, Manchester and London; equally comfortable remote. For anything hospitality, expect me to want a Friday or Saturday on site early on.
Tell me what you’re working on. If I can’t help, I’ll say so on the call and point you at someone who can.