The Entrepreneur
I have always been drawn to building things.
For me, entrepreneurship usually begins with a simple feeling: something could work better, a problem is worth solving or an idea deserves to be tested in the real world.
“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” — Farrah Gray
There is a certain kind of restlessness that I recognise in many entrepreneurs.
It is not always dramatic. More often, it is a quiet and persistent feeling that something could work better, that an idea is worth testing, or that a problem should not simply be accepted because nobody has solved it yet.
I think I have always had some of that in me.
Every entrepreneur I respect seems to have the same low, steady fire. Call it drive or stubbornness — it is the thing that keeps you moving when the work is repetitive, the outcome is uncertain and nobody is going to notice the effort until much later.
Starting with what I had
Neither business began with a grand plan.
My journey as an entrepreneur began in London, where I founded Phi Tuition in 2014 and, a few years later, QCD Consulting.
Neither started with outside funding or a large team. Both began with a modest personal investment, an idea and a willingness to work things out as I went.
Both businesses have grown organically. Looking back, I value that enormously. Slow, earned growth forces you to understand what people actually need and which ideas genuinely survive contact with the real world.
Earlier experience
Consultancy taught me how businesses really work.
A great deal of what helped me build my own companies came from my earlier career in management and technology consultancy.
That work gave me a front-row seat to how organisations actually function — where the friction is, where value is created and how rarely the two line up neatly on paper.
It gave me practical instincts that I still rely on today. When I eventually became responsible for my own businesses, many of the problems felt new. The way I approached them did not.
The people around you
Building is rarely a solo activity.
Entrepreneurship is often presented as the story of one person with a brilliant idea. My own experience has been rather different.
I have been fortunate to work alongside people whose judgement I trust completely — in product, finance and strategy — and more than one good decision in either business came from a conversation rather than a spreadsheet.
You do not need a very large team. But you do need people who are honest enough to challenge an idea, experienced enough to see what you may have missed and committed enough to keep moving when things become difficult.
Change
The businesses keep changing.
One of the things I enjoy most about entrepreneurship is that the work never really stays still.
A business begins with one problem. Then the market changes. Technology changes. Customers change. Sometimes your own understanding of the problem changes too.
That is particularly true in education and technology, where my work increasingly sits at the intersection of software, data and artificial intelligence.
Three things I have come to value more with every business I build.
Leadership
Develop your leadership alongside your business knowledge. Eventually something will not go to plan, and how you lead through that moment matters.
Perspective
Think beyond the next milestone. A good business decision should still make sense when viewed from further away.
Constraints
Treat limited time, money or resources as a starting point for creativity rather than an automatic reason to stop.
I am still learning how to build better.
My work today increasingly sits at the intersection of education and technology.
I am interested in how software, data and artificial intelligence can remove unnecessary complexity, help people make better decisions and create systems that are genuinely useful rather than simply impressive.
The tools change. The questions change. The process of building, testing and learning remains remarkably familiar.
I am still building.
A good idea on its own does not survive first contact with the market. It needs patience, judgement, leadership and a willingness to keep adjusting when reality disagrees with the original plan.
That, for me, is much of the appeal.
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