I grew up in a wedding venue. By sixteen I’d worked the kitchen, taken bookings and done silver service. I understood what couples noticed long before I understood a P&L.
Then I spent two decades building businesses outside hospitality. First a lead generation and marketing agency. Then GoResponse, a multi-channel contact centre I grew into a team that looked after M&S, P&O, Macmillan, Moss Bros and Heathrow. In 2012 it was named the best contact centre in EMEA and third best in the world, and I was named the region’s best contact centre leader. Around the same time I launched one of the UK’s first AI agencies and built Cart Assist, conversational engagement software, a decade before ChatGPT made the idea ordinary.
I ran Heathrow’s customer service until 2016. Together we won a place in the UK’s highly respected Top 50 Customer Service Awards, and we broke new ground by putting the first social media engagement team inside their offices, well ahead of most enterprises, listening and replying to travellers on the channels they actually used. I sold the business in 2016 to a larger group and stayed on as a director until the group sold in 2018.
Post sale, I took some time out, and walked straight into the pandemic a year later. I came out the other side not sure where I fitted. The tools had moved. Customer behaviour had changed.
Then came the new world of AI and automation, and I realised the technology was never the threat. It was the opportunity. It isn’t a fad, it’s something we all have to adapt to if we want to stay relevant. I’m old enough to have watched a few evolutions and revolutions, from the internet to e-commerce to social media, with a couple of global economic catastrophes along the way. I’ve been in the engagement business long enough not to fear change, but to treat it as an advantage.
So I spent a couple of years after COVID rebuilding. Not the businesses. Me. I went deep on where engagement and AI were actually heading, and slowly the ground felt firm again. I’m out the other side now, on a path I chose rather than one I fell into.
I say all this because if you run a venue and feel behind, I’m not standing ahead of you because I’m cleverer or younger. I went through the same disorientation. I just started a couple of years before you, and I know the way through. This really is a fight, freeze or flight moment. I’m passionate about working with people who have the aptitude to stay relevant to their customers, who love creating the wow, who are genuinely passionate about their business. That has been the driver behind every venture I’ve built. I want to partner with leaders who embrace change, who value a trustworthy pair of hands, and who are up for this slightly mad journey of reinvention.
What I see right now
I chose wedding venues deliberately. I understand the stress of running hospitality, of never quite being able to switch off. And I love that this is one of the last bastions of independence: there’s no McDonald’s of the venue sector. I thrive on the passion and the dedication to delight that venue owners and their managers bring.
But there’s a quiet panic across the venues I talk to. Everyone knows that running things the way they did in 2016 has stopped working, so they bolt on another system, then another, try to teach themselves AI on a Sunday night, and end up with more tools and less clarity. The hard part was never the technology. It’s not knowing who to trust.
That’s the gap I work in. Not a five-year prediction, the next twelve months: getting a venue from scattered and reactive to calm, current and converting, with someone who’s done it holding the other end of the rope.
Away from the work
A few things keep me level. Music was my first business. At nineteen I set up Sound Creation Ltd, writing music for TV and radio, and I never really stopped. Most weekends you’ll find me playing saxophone alongside DJs, often, as it happens, in wedding venues.
I ski, and I love France enough to work from there for part of the season and again in the summer. My son is twenty and reading law at university, which is partly why I’ve had the room to reinvest in myself and get back to what I enjoy most: building something good with people I like.
And yes, there are four chihuahuas. I’m as surprised as you are.
If that sounds like the conversation you need to have, book a discovery call. Thirty minutes, no pitch.
