Hi, I’m Jon.
I’m a Fractional Delivery & Operations Director for scaling service businesses. Specifically the ones where growth has outpaced how the business actually runs.
The short version
I got here via a route that looks mad on paper. I’ve been into tech since I was little - taking things apart, rebuilding them (with bits left over), working out how they work. Sound engineering paid the bills through my late teens, then retail management and channel work in my twenties - the actual foundation for running things later. Then formal: a Multimedia Web Design degree at Gloucestershire, then front-end developer, project management, delivery leadership, and eventually running ops for other people’s businesses.
In 2022 I watched two companies I’d worked hard for take investment, push for ambitious scale, and collapse. Being close to two in quick succession made the pattern impossible to ignore - the fix was always the same: clarity, ownership, someone who could see the whole thing and actually do something about it. That’s how the fractional model happened. Not some grand plan - just a practical response to seeing the same patterns and deciding to work on them properly. Which means I’ve got a very clear view by now of what keeps growing businesses upright, and what pulls them under.
What I actually believe
Most people wait until something’s on fire before they think about how the business runs. I think that’s a bit late.
Better to build the systems as the business scales - fewer things on fire, fewer weekends spent putting them out. The state you end up in is what I call good boring. Where the projects that used to feel dramatic just… don’t anymore. Where your reporting is a byproduct of the work, not a monthly project.
Simpler than you might expect. And slower to land than you might want.
What that usually looks like
Delivery leaking hours is almost always a handover problem. Reporting taking forever is almost always a source-of-truth problem. Founder becoming the bottleneck is almost always an ownership problem. Same shape, different flavour, every time.
What I build tends to fix those in the specific way your business works:
- Brief generators that standardise inputs (~5 hours saved per project)
- No-code automation stacks in n8n, Make and Zapier (delivery hours down, cost-to-serve steady)
- Reporting where the monthly numbers come out of the work, not from a separate scramble
- Handover processes that don’t depend on the one person who remembers how they go
- Remote-first delivery rhythms - including a full-company remote transition in the first week of COVID, no client deliverable missed
- Coaching programmes for distributed delivery teams so quality holds up regardless of where the work lands
Different builds. Same underlying job: making sense of what’s actually happening, then building the thing that makes it work.
How I work
Hands-on. Embedded with your team, working in your business, doing the work with people rather than describing what should be done from outside.
My default is to build the thing rather than the strategy about it. Turning up on a Wednesday to fix a broken handover. Building the tool your team will actually use. Writing the process with the person on your team who owns it.
I take a small number of clients at a time so I can actually be there. Properly there. Which means I spot the thing before it becomes your crisis.
Where I am, when I’m not doing this
Cheltenham. A Regency spa town on the edge of the Cotswolds, best known for the Gold Cup and, less proudly, Cheese Rolling.
Outside of work you’ll usually find me building electric guitars with my dad, out on a mountain bike, or on an adventure with my wife Emma (an artist) and our dog Gibson.
If any of this sounds like your business, let’s talk.