I make the marketing call. Then I do the work.
For five clients at a time, one day a week each. There isn’t room for more, and that’s the point.
Ask about a placeA few things I’ve built
£10K → £10M
Bootstrapped an e-commerce business to £10M annual revenue, led a $5M Series A, and exited in 2023.
250K → 3M
Grew a community platform’s monthly visitors twelvefold as CMO, adding £500K of annual revenue.
0 → an annual summit
Founded a scientific conference that brought regulators, scientists and industry into one room. It still runs annually.
When to bring me in
It rarely arrives as a marketing plan. It arrives as a question you can’t park any longer.
Why the list is short.
I’ve spent fourteen years growing businesses in categories where you can’t buy attention. That teaches you to build an audience, compound the customers you already have, and do it on less than you’d like.
Five clients. One dedicated day each, every week. That’s the limit.
The day is yours — not the margins of a week already sold four times over.
For a corporate team: senior attention on a project that needs it, working alongside your department lead. For an SME: a marketing director’s judgement, plus someone who will actually build the proposition, plan or campaign.
Neil
McLaren.
I like the awkward bit between a good idea and finished work.
Read my backgroundI’ve built a company from nothing and sold it. I’ve run marketing for a business at scale. And I’ve worked agency-side on major retail brands, where the constraint isn’t budget but the people who have to agree.
That range is why I’m useful. A founder’s problem and a department head’s problem look nothing alike, and advice built for one usually breaks in the other.
I trained as an artist before any of it, and I still design. Most of what I get called in for doesn’t exist yet — a proposition, a format, a product — so I’d rather build a rough version you can look at than describe it in a deck.
Tell me about the opportunity on your desk.
A few lines about the market, product or project is enough. It comes straight to me.