The story behind The Catalyst Programme

The Journey

I moved to the UK from the United States in 1989 with a BSc in Business and a clear ambition: to own companies. I started in audit, moved into industry, and by 1992 was working as a Financial Director for a lighting manufacturing and import group. Over four years, I helped grow that business from two companies into a diversified group — manufacturing, importing, retail concessions, and a pottery acquisition. In 1997, I led the management buyout of the business.

In the same year, I opened a children’s daycare business as a family venture. That business is still trading today as a multi-million pound operation.

After selling the lighting business in 1999, I moved into international chemical distribution, overseeing financial operations across 16 offices in Europe — including several in Eastern Europe, where I often joke that I had to teach the concept of profit to people who had grown up in economies where profit was not a familiar idea.

In 2000, I began building my own accountancy practice, incorporating it in 2003. Over the following years, the practice grew through acquisition, culminating in the purchase of Brookwood Accountancy Ltd. Throughout all of it, one thing became increasingly clear: the numbers were only half the story.

The Insight That Changed Everything

Early in my accountancy career, I presented a client — Mike Peagram of CMS Chemicals — with a Corporation Tax bill of £180,000. Most business owners would have winced. Mike did not. He said it was not enough. He wanted a £250,000 tax bill. Then a £500,000 tax bill. Because if he had a half-million pound tax liability, his profits would be that much larger.

I have used that story ever since, because it captures the fundamental difference between compliance and coaching.

Your accountant is paid to keep you out of trouble with HMRC. That is compliance. It is essential, but it has nothing to do with your business success. The Catalyst Programme is about the other thing — the thing your accountant was never hired to do.

Think of it this way: your accountant makes sure you don’t get a speeding ticket. But they never teach you how to drive — or how to maintain the vehicle. That is where coaching begins.

The COVID Pivot

The decision to formalise coaching came during the pandemic. A client — the owner of an IT company — had spent three hours with me working through how to pivot his business to survive the crisis. At the end of the session, he said: “You should do this kind of work with all your clients.”

That conversation sent me back to the Entrepreneurs’ Circle, where I had already seen first-hand the power of structured business frameworks. I completed the EC Coaching accreditation and began integrating coaching into the advisory services of the accountancy practice.

The result is The Catalyst Programme — a structured, sustained coaching engagement that combines financial rigour with behavioural insight, and that treats every client’s business as if it were my own.

How I Work

I am direct. I will tell you things your friends, your family, and your previous advisors have probably been too polite to say. I will challenge your assumptions, question your priorities, and push back when I think you are wrong.

But I am also genuinely invested. I care about the outcomes. I have sat where you are sitting — I know what it feels like to be responsible for other people’s livelihoods, to lie awake thinking about cashflow, to feel like the business is running you rather than the other way around.

I tell stories. I use my own mistakes as examples. I have no interest in being seen as someone who has all the answers — because the best coaching is a conversation, not a lecture.

If that sounds like the kind of working relationship you have been looking for, let’s talk.