From the Met to the Mojave — and everything I built in between.

Twenty years reading people

I joined the Metropolitan Police in the UK and spent over two decades learning how humans actually behave — under pressure, under questioning, when they think nobody is watching. You develop a particular kind of pattern recognition that doesn’t switch off.

Policing at that level is fundamentally a systems problem. Managing informants, coordinating operations, making decisions with incomplete information, building processes that hold up when things go wrong. That’s not so different from running a business.

What I didn’t know then was that every skill I was developing — reading rooms, building trust quickly, spotting inconsistencies, thinking in systems — would turn out to be exactly what entrepreneurship requires.

Clinical hypnotherapist

Alongside policing, I trained and practised as a clinical hypnotherapist. It deepened something I was already developing on the job — an understanding of how people actually make decisions, what drives behaviour beneath the surface, and how to create the conditions for change.

Those skills — rapport building, reading the room, understanding motivation — turned out to be as useful in a boardroom as in a consulting room. They show up in every negotiation, every client conversation, every hiring decision I make today.

Swapping the badge for a blank page

Moving to Arizona with my wife Liza and daughter Rae wasn’t a retirement plan — it was a restart. We arrived with conviction and without a roadmap. The pet industry wasn’t something I’d researched in advance. I found it because Liza started a pet sitting business, and I watched what happened when you build something people genuinely need in a market that’s genuinely underserved.

Scritches Pet Sitting grew to over ~$400k in annual revenue with 35-40 independent contractors — managed day to day by Liza. It wasn’t magic. It was systems, hiring right, and applying the same operational discipline I’d used in policing to a completely different context.

The pet industry has a problem I can fix

The more I looked at the pet industry, the more I saw the same pattern everywhere: brilliant operators who love animals, overwhelmed by the business side. Fragmented software. No clear path from solo operator to scalable business. No one building the infrastructure these owners actually need.

That’s where everything I’m building now comes from — not a pivot, not a trend, but a genuine gap I can see clearly because I’ve lived on both sides of it.

Building the ecosystem

Today I’m building a vertically integrated pet industry ecosystem — software, services, licensed professional services, media, and physical locations — designed from the ground up to operate without my daily presence.

That’s the rainmaker model: every income stream designed to generate whether I’m in Surprise, Arizona or back in England visiting family. Location independence isn’t a lifestyle goal — it’s a proof of concept.