I’ve mentioned before that I would rather have 1,000 businesses pay me £20 than one business pay me £20,000. I absolutely stand by that. Having one or two sources of income is a bit like holding one or two stocks. It will be bumpy and it’s unlikely in the long…

I’ve been using Endole for years. I like to do my due diligence on new clients and collaborators. Having a top-level report on a company is not only really useful, but it’s also, in my opinion, really interesting. As I’ve written before, I like to see the numbers because a…

For years I have said that blogging regularly is the best way to rank for search. And I still believe that to be true, but with the caveat that the way it is being done in most cases, and I’m afraid to say the way I have been doing it…

I’m an ambitious person, and with that comes the desire to scale a business and grow a large team. For years now, I have been running Yazaroo, and on a few occasions I have flirted with the idea of scaling, only to row back into optimisation instead. The best work…

Yazaroo has always been an agency with design at its core. Not surprising since I graduated from art school, but I have always seen it as a defining characteristic of the work we do: design first. Over the course of time, I learned how to dev WordPress, how to manage…

Every time a new technology emerges, people rush to tell me it is the end of my agency. Right now, the supposed existential threat to Yazaroo is AI. The reality is that AI threatens us in exactly the same way Wix and Squarespace did a decade ago, which is to…

I am seeing more business consultants than ever. While I am sure there are good ones out there, I have never encountered one that actually delivered on what they promised. It is interesting to note that the majority share the same origin story: they were running a company, turning over…

Following my previous post on why agencies should prioritise “good enough,” I had a conversation regarding the importance of founders having a “passion” for their work. The argument is that you need to love what you do to survive in the long term. My view is the opposite: the last…

I have been weighing two opposing approaches to business: the pursuit of the “very best” versus the pursuit of the “optimised.” In the creative and agency world, the default setting is to strive for the highest possible standard in every video, design, or build. I’ve decided that for the vast…

In ten years of running agencies and businesses, I’ve seen every model there is. The one that sticks out like a sore thumb, and the one I avoid at all costs, is the “Big Client” trap. Unless you are in a highly specialised manufacturing niche where that’s just the nature…

In 2025, Alex Clarke and I launched Comus. After years of navigating the events industry and seeing how bloated software platforms operate, we realised there was a gap for something that actually worked for the organiser, not just the middleman. What is Comus? Comus is an event management platform built…

I started Yazaroo in 2015 with a bit of help from The Prince’s Trust and a lot of cups of tea. Back then, I was just trying to prove that you could build a digital agency that didn’t rely on fluff and jargon. Ten years later, we’ve moved through offices…

With The Fifth launching soon, and knowing you can’t actually see the platform yet, I wanted to document the “why” behind the brand. I’m not going to bore you with every technical detail. It’s better to let you see it for yourself. But here is some food for thought. Who…

If you look at the “official” way to start a business, it’s all about the pitch deck. You’re supposed to show five-year projections, market analysis, and a bulletproof business plan. But in 2018, when I decided to go into business with Neil Phillipson, I didn’t have a deck. I didn’t…

Of all the things I care about when running a business, productivity is right at the top of the list, second only to cash flow. The two are closely linked. If the cash is flowing, profit can usually be found through productivity. Doing more with less. Running lean. Removing friction….

Do we actually need offices in 2026? Or has the world of work become more nomadic, more fluid, and frankly more sensible? From my experience, the value of having a dedicated office with your entire team sat in it full time has massively diminished. That doesn’t mean offices are useless….

For well over a decade, I’ve been telling business owners the same thing: the best way to drive traffic to your website is through blogging. Specifically, by posting authoritative, SEO-optimised content targeted at the search terms your market uses when they have a problem you can solve. This isn’t new,…

We’re thinking about building reviews into Comus. The idea is simple: if you buy a ticket to an event, you get a link a week later asking you to review it. Like Etsy or eBay, where you review the seller rather than the product, our system would let people review…

I find networking to be hit and miss. Mostly miss. The best networking I’ve ever done has never been labelled as networking. It’s been meeting like-minded business owners while doing something else entirely. Shared activity first, business second. Organised breakfast meetings, on the other hand, tend to attract people with…

Bundles are a great way to sell services. They simplify what can otherwise be a confusing offering, and they’re good for business because they naturally create opportunities for upsell. But in my experience, there’s a right way to sell bundles and a wrong way to sell bundles. Bundles Work for…