I wore every hat for 20 years. Then I built the systems to take them off.

In 2002, I started an online sweet shop called A Quarter Of with eighty-five pounds of stock and a website cobbled together from a CD on the front of a computer magazine. No business plan. No investors. Just an idea and the willingness to figure it out.

It grew. Fast. Within a couple of years we were featured in The Times, The Telegraph, and on national TV. At peak, we were selling over one million pounds of retro sweets in a single month on Amazon. The business was featured in a book about UK entrepreneurs. From the outside, it looked like success.

From the inside, I was the bottleneck. I was customer service, stock control, marketing, strategy, and the person who drove to the wholesaler in a white van. Every system in the business ran through me – because I’d built them all, and nobody else knew how they worked. Sound familiar?

So I started building systems. Not because I was a developer – I wasn’t. Because I had no choice. The stock control spreadsheet became a proper system. The manual reordering process became an automated one. Customer queries that used to eat half my morning got triaged before I’d finished my coffee. Over the years, the tools I built got more sophisticated. I taught myself Python. Then I discovered what AI could actually do when you pointed it at real business problems – not the hype, the practical stuff. The kind that saves you three hours on a Tuesday afternoon because a process that used to need your attention now just runs quietly in the background.

I learned something in those twenty years that most consultants never will: you can’t fix a business by studying it from outside. You have to understand how every part connects – how a change in one place ripples through everything else. You have to know what it feels like when the phone rings at ten on a Saturday night and it’s your problem because it’s always your problem. That’s what wearing every hat teaches you. And that’s what makes the difference between automation that works and automation that creates new problems.

I sold A Quarter Of in 2024. Not because it failed – because I’d spent two decades learning something more valuable than any single business: how to spot the bottlenecks that keep founders trapped, and how to build the systems that set them free.

That’s what Too Many Hats does. We take the thing that’s eating your time right now and we fix it. One problem at a time. No six-month discovery phases. No jargon. No thirty-page proposals that gather dust. Just the same approach I used to get my own time back – applied to yours.