The longer version

I work with a small number of founder-led businesses as their creative partner. Before that, twenty years of directing.

I started young. Making films at school and sharing them nationally, then producing at BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra at sixteen, looking after shows, working with presenters, sat in the middle of the engineering. I also worked on internal communications for the BBC, which meant sitting with senior leadership in my teens and learning how to turn what executives mean into something a team can actually make. I had good mentors around me. Around the same time Jamal Edwards at SBTV was watching my work and giving me feedback, which shaped a lot of how I thought about the music industry early on.

The first music video I ever made was a piece of college work. It’s past ten million views now, and it is deeply embarrassing, so good luck finding it.

From there, music and commercials. Music videos in Vietnam, several productions in Bollywood including work for Amazon Prime and Coke Studio, and productions in Japan. Videos for Sam Smith, Rudimental, David Guetta and Becky Hill, among others. Campaigns for Apple, Barclays, Beats and Amazon. Somewhere north of 500 million views, though nobody counts these things properly.

Alongside the directing, I spent years in artist development, shaping early work into packages that helped acts land six and seven figure record deals. Not filming what already existed. Building the thing that made someone worth signing.

I’ve mentored filmmakers too, some of whom are now considerably bigger than me. Having had people pay attention to my work early on, it’s the part I’m most pleased about.

For a long time I thought I was being hired to direct films. I was being hired to make creative decisions.

Every environment taught me something. Broadcast taught me discipline. Music taught me instinct, and how to work with a lot of different egos wanting a lot of different things. Advertising taught me that creativity has to solve a commercial problem or it isn’t doing its job.

But what I kept noticing was that I was more interested in the business than the entertainment.

I still love making the work. What I enjoy most now is tying it to something real: a product, a revenue line, a direction the business is actually trying to go. One of the first companies I worked with this way grew its revenue tenfold over five years. My role was never just to make films. I shaped the positioning, built the creative team, raised the standard, and made sure every piece of work served where the business was heading.

Founders are pulled in every direction. Sales, finance, hiring, operations, growth, and somehow the creative side as well. Most don’t need another agency. They need someone they trust to own that part of the business.

There’s a specific version of this I see constantly. The people at the top know what they want but can’t quite articulate it, so it goes down half formed. The creative team then make something perfectly competent that answers the wrong brief. Nobody has done anything wrong and everybody is frustrated. A lot of my job is standing in that gap: getting what’s in a founder’s head into a shape a team can act on, and being honest when the idea itself is the problem.

I know what good looks like, and I’ll tell you when something isn’t. Often the most useful thing I say is much blunter than that. You’re spending how much on this? Why is that the priority? Some of the best conversations I’ve had with founders started with “I don’t think that’s the right decision, and here’s why.”

I pay a lot of attention to the team. Talented creatives stay when the work is going somewhere and leave when it isn’t, usually about eighteen months in, and usually before anyone has worked out why. Keeping good people is a creative problem as much as a management one.

Long term, embedded, hands on, never more than a handful at once. Sometimes that means shaping strategy, hiring talent or fixing how the work gets made. Sometimes it means directing the film that matters most.

Filmmaking is still one of my strongest tools. It is no longer the whole job.

Great creative work is rarely an accident. It happens when talented people are given clear direction, trusted to do their best work and led with honesty.

That’s the work I do.