The Main Thing
I work with owner-operators of established businesses to make sense of complexity that has built up over time.
The focus isn’t ideas, advice, or strategy decks.
It’s understanding how decisions, constraints, and effort are interacting inside a live business — and clarifying what is creating friction, resistance, or drag.
The work is practical and grounded.
It spans operational, structural, and development realities — wherever complexity is being created.
It is grounded in direct operating experience rather than imported frameworks or packaged methodologies.
The engagement is with me directly, I call the process Navigator.
Who's Navigator for?
This is for you if:
You’re not starting from zero.
You’re working inside something that already exists — and needs to move more cleanly again.
- You own the business and carry responsibility for outcomes.
- The business is operating — with users, customers, revenue, and real pressure.
- The organisation is established or actively scaling.
- Progress feels slower, harder, or less predictable than it should.
- You’re looking for clarity rather than advice or reassurance.
This work requires a real operating context and the capacity for meaningful engagement. It’s unlikely to be a fit for idea-stage ventures, exploratory conversations, or situations where responsibility for decisions sits elsewhere.
How I Work
The purpose of Navigator is to help you, the owner, develop a holistic - clear mental model of the company:
- Owner: How you are operating as the owner.
- Product: What customers are really experiencing.
- System: How the underlying system is behaving.
This process reveals misalignment, friction, and blind spots that are often difficult to detect from inside the day-to-day.
From that clarity, priorities and corrective moves tend to emerge naturally.
Owner
Every business reflects its owner.
Priorities, standards, tolerances, and postponed decisions shape how the organisation behaves.
Ownership is expressed through attention and behaviour, not title or equity.
I look at how leadership and responsibility are showing up day to day — and how that may need to evolve for the business to move more cleanly.
Product
The product is not just what is sold.
It is the experience customers actually receive.
That experience is shaped by how work flows through the business — handoffs, delays, decisions, and follow-through.
Improving results often means changing how the product experience is produced, rather than adding more effort.
System
Systems make outcomes repeatable.
When systems are unclear or overloaded, people compensate with workarounds — effective short term, fragile over time.
The aim isn’t more process.
It’s fewer, clearer systems that enable good work without constant intervention.
My Operating Record
I’ve been building and running businesses for over twenty years. My last company grew from a very small operation into a worldwide e-commerce business and was later exited. Today HTC (How To Company) sits at the core of my work as a research and development company — a structure that allows me to continuously build, test, and operate systems rather than step away from them. The value of this record isn’t in success stories. It’s in long exposure to how real businesses and real systems behave over time — especially through friction, constraint, uncertainty, and change.
E-commerce Company (2006 → 2022)
Co-founded and scaled a global e-commerce operation spanning manufacturing, supply chain, technology, and customer experience layers.Sales were predominantly international, with the majority of revenue generated outside Ireland. The operating reality required continuous navigation of growth, logistics complexity, systems integration, customer experience, and organisational evolution. It also required sustained evolution at the owner level — adapting decision-making, tolerance for risk, cognitive load, and leadership posture as the business expanded in scale and complexity.
Core experience gained:
- China-based manufacturing and China–Europe supply chain
- Distribution infrastructure across the EU, UK, and Ireland
- India-based development capability
- Direct e-commerce sales channels
- Customer-facing application layer
- Integrated content and media systems
- Amazon FBA integration
- Multi-cloud Salesforce architecture
Fieldnotes (2024 - Present)
Fieldnotes is a system I developed at HTC to explore AI capabilities. After exiting the e-commerce company, I spent time writing about the experiences of building and running a business. I noticed that one of the fundamental challenges of working with long-form writing over time is the difficulty of comparing, contrasting, and connecting ideas across tens of thousands of words.
Fieldnotes is a system designed to address this challenge. It is a tool for extracting fundamental learnings from long-form articles. These become a collection of field notes (like a field manual) that you can refer to.
The second part of Fieldnotes is matching your meaning — your questions — to the field notes. Your questions surface relevant notes. The field notes are linked to the original articles. You can try Fieldnotes on this website.n
Core experience gained:
- Author Voice GPT — learning to write field notes in the style of the original author’s article.
- Encoding the field notes into a structured data format using an LLM so they can be indexed.
- Encoding the user’s question into the same LLM representation.
- Semantic matching the user’s question to the field notes.
- Returning the most relevant field notes to the user.
Swords Live (2025 - Present)
Founded and developed a live town-scale platform designed to model what is happening in Swords in real time. The system integrates transport data, geospatial layers, local conditions, and civic-context signals into a unified operational view. The operating reality requires continuous iteration across data ingestion, inference logic, interface design, system reliability, and user comprehension. It also demands sustained evolution at the owner level — balancing product vision, technical architecture, stakeholder alignment, and long-horizon platform strategy.
Core experience gained:
- Real-time transport data ingestion and normalisation
- Geospatial mapping and town-scale spatial modelling
- Trip inference and probabilistic matching systems
- Live state management and observability pipelines
- Civic-context UX and information clarity design
- Multi-source data integration (APIs, sensors, feeds)
- Cloud-native architecture and deployment workflows
- Building under ambiguity with evolving requirements.
now... The Main Thing
This work begins with a conversation.
A straightforward conversation — not to explore ideas, but to understand the situation you are operating within and whether I can be genuinely useful.
If we speak, the first step is simply to establish a clear view of the current reality. In some cases that leads to working together. In others, clarity itself is the outcome.
I work with one owner-operator at a time. Engagements require meaningful commitment of attention, time, and cost.
If this feels relevant:
Just reach out.
I will reply personally.