The resume

CCTV Aware started while I was still a serving detective. After years of investigations that lived or died on the quality of camera footage, I had seen every mistake it was possible to make with CCTV: cameras pointing at nothing, unreadable images, systems nobody knew how to operate. I founded the company to do it properly, designing and installing systems that actually do their job when it matters, with the honest, family-run service I would want at my own front door.

Fifteen years with the Met, working my way into the Homicide & Serious Crime Command. The job taught me things no business school could: how to plan an investigation from nothing, how to interview anyone about anything, how to keep a clear head when the stakes are at their highest, and how much detail matters. Everything I do in business today is built on habits formed there.

Before the Met, there was the shop. I took over our family off licence and supermarket in Hackney and became the licensee, which is a fast education in responsibility. Early mornings, late nights, cash flow, suppliers, difficult customers and all. Two years behind that counter taught me more about real-world business than anything before or since, and when the Met came calling in 2002, I went in with an education money cannot buy.

I built my first website in 1995, as a teenager, when the web was dial-up modems and hand-written HTML. That hobby became Metserve Media, and it has run alongside everything else I have done since, through the shop years, the entire police career, and now CCTV Aware. Three decades on, the tools have changed beyond recognition but the job is the same: getting businesses found online, including household names like Subway, TDI Plc and Army & Navy stores.