I fell in love
with a spreadsheet.

Numbers first

Data gave me a way into marketing because it made the work feel less mystical. Traffic moved. Rankings moved. Conversion rates moved. You could test something, see what happened and make a better decision next time.

I still think that way. I like evidence. I like a spreadsheet. I like knowing whether something changed. The bit I have had to learn since is that the number never tells the whole story. People are inconsistent, emotional and full of context. That is not a flaw in the data. It is the interesting bit the data cannot see.

The technical years

SEO became my way into the wider marketing world because it behaved like a system. Crawl it. Fix it. Measure it. Learn from it. In the earlier days, that cause and effect could feel wonderfully direct.

The technical grounding stuck. I still want to know how things work, not just what they are called. But over time I became much more interested in the question above the channel. Why are we doing this at all? What does the business need to change? What would make this useful rather than merely well executed?

The board meeting

There was a board meeting where I realised I was sitting on my own little island. I could see the argument I was making. I could not make the room see why it mattered in the same way.

I did not stand up, deliver a dramatic speech and resign on the spot. I went back to work. I stayed for another six months. Eventually I left. That is probably a more accurate version of most big decisions. They are rarely one brave moment. They are a collection of smaller moments that become difficult to ignore.

A small room, painted green

Pursuit started in a small home office with green walls. No grand launch. No clever founder story at the time. Just a desk, a lot of ideas, and the uncomfortable knowledge that I now had to prove some of them.

I like that the green has followed the business. It reminds me that everything gets built in much less glamorous conditions than the finished version suggests. You make a decision, do the work, get bits wrong, learn, and keep going.

Strategy before the sale

One of the biggest changes in how I work was learning to stop beginning with the thing somebody asked to buy. A business can ask for SEO, paid media, social or a new website and still have a problem none of those things will solve.

So the first conversation changed. What is the business trying to do? What is stopping it? What would need to be true for marketing to help? Only then do we talk about channels. Sometimes the sensible answer is more marketing. Sometimes it is better marketing. Sometimes marketing is not the problem yet. That is a useful thing to be able to say out loud.

What running a business teaches you

Trust compounds. Most of the best things in business have come through somebody deciding to trust us before the spreadsheet could fully justify it.

Generosity works best when it is not a tactic. I would rather give somebody a useful answer and let them decide what to do with it than turn every conversation into a funnel.

Communication is part of the work, not the admin around the work. A result nobody understands does not feel like a result for very long. Silence creates its own story, and it is rarely the one you would have chosen.

Boundaries took me longer. I used to confuse being available with being useful. I am better at that now. Still not perfect, but much less impressed by a full calendar.

Building the rest of it

Pursuit is where we do the work with clients. MyMarketr came from a different question: how do you make useful marketing thinking available to businesses that do not need a full agency? So I co-founded software to help make that clearer, calmer and more achievable.

Marketing Unzipped gave me room to explore ideas without forcing them into a neat social post. The book came from another pattern I kept seeing. Businesses were often good at getting attention, then weak at helping people move from interest to action. Managing Marketing's Messy Middle is 100 practical ways to clean up that bit.

They are different projects, but the argument underneath them is the same. Marketing should make more sense than the industry sometimes makes it sound.

ADHD, football and what success looks like now

I have ADHD. I do not think of it as a founder superpower and I do not think of it as an excuse. It means my brain moves quickly, spots connections, gets excited by new problems and occasionally makes simple admin feel weirdly difficult. The spreadsheets, systems and routines are scaffolding. They give the useful chaos somewhere to go.

Football matters for completely different reasons. It gets me out of marketing, gives me something else to think about, and has taught me that people rarely perform better because somebody shouted a more complicated plan at them.

Success used to look a lot like growth for growth's sake. I am less interested in that now. I want to do work I care about, with people I like, build things that are useful, keep learning, and still be present for the bits outside work that matter more than any dashboard.