What do you do?

I am a Partner and Head of Early Stage in the Tech & High Growth Team. I work closely with early-stage founders and entrepreneurs across all accounting, tax and advisory disciplines. More than anything, my role is to cultivate a personal relationship with the earliest members of a founding team and help them navigate their journey to scale.

Why do you do it?

Fundamentally, I do it because I enjoy it but more deeply, I cherish the opportunity to play a role in helping talented people succeed.

Over the years, I have always been in the unique position of being an entrepreneur that advises entrepreneurs, and that vantage point has always helped me cultivate a special empathy for founders. I don’t love spreadsheets, but I love asking questions that spreadsheets can answer.

We are lucky to have the very best talent within our team and so whether founders need advice, introductions or just a steady pair of hands; the relationship they share with us tends to be the only place they can get all three.

Ultimately, my passion is driven by treating each client as a personal challenge to see them win. Early-stage tech is hard enough as it is, and I see what we do as providing founders with an edge.

What kind of projects have you been involved in?

Having worked in this sector for almost my entire career, I have been involved in a range of all sorts of interesting projects. The fun examples include advising a machine learning startup from incorporation to a multi £m exit within two years, designing a brand ambassador contract between a tech company and a hip-hop artist, all the way to working on a bid to acquire a Premiership football team.

My relationship is always with the founder and so the variety of conversations always follows their journey.

As well as the above, being early-stage focused has also led to acting as a specialist advisor in situations involving SEIS/EIS, share option schemes and the tax incentives landscape. All the above has afforded me the opportunity to sit on multiple UK Government boards and advise on the tech ecosystem.

What’s on top of your bucket list?

In my mind, I have always thought of a bucket list of things that you do not truly believe are achievable.

Thankfully, my experience of life has been that everything else is just a series of intentions and actions. With that being the case, I will learn to play the piano and the guitar having started and stopped many times before & also complete my pilot’s license. Longer term, I would like to continue my personal passion project in helping with alleviating hunger and reaching a personal target of facilitating 1 million meals.