The Portfolio Executives

I spent eight years at Wiggle watching the business grow from £10M to £200M. When I left, I realised the thing I had loved most wasn’t any single channel or campaign, it was the building. Walking into a blank canvas, figuring out what needed solving, building it, proving it worked, and handing it over. I wanted to keep doing that, but for more than one founder at a time. A permanent role at one company felt like a step backwards. Portfolio working felt like the natural evolution of everything I had learned.

I set up Quayside Digital in 2017 after leaving Baker Ross, where I had been Ecommerce Director. My first clients came through people who already knew my work, founders and investors I had met through Wiggle and the wider ecommerce world. I didn’t have a polished proposition or a website. I had a track record and a phone. That was enough to get started. Over the next five years, I worked with 28+ brands, including Huel, Vivobarefoot, Simba Sleep, and Tails, learning what founders actually need versus what they think they need.

Wiggle is the foundation everything else is built on, but the engagement I am most proud of in portfolio terms was Nationwide Hire Solutions, a B2B equipment hire intermediary backed by Livingbridge. It was my first real proof that what I had learned in ecommerce translated beyond DTC. The commercial problems were the same, no single owner of the growth equation, measurement chaos, agencies working in isolation. I came in, diagnosed the big issues, built the framework, and left them with something that worked without me. That pattern has repeated itself across every successful engagement since.

Along the way, I’ve learned that the problem is almost never the channel. Founders often come thinking the answer is a new paid social strategy or a better email sequence, but it rarely is. The real problem is upstream, no shared version of the truth, no single person accountable for the commercial outcome, no one joining the dots. Fix that first, and the channels start working. I’ve also learned that the best thing you can do for a founder is not give them more options, it’s give them clarity on what to stop doing as much as what to start.

It’s working for me now because the fractional model has matured. Founders understand it far better than they did in 2017. The conversation has shifted from “what exactly is fractional?” to “how quickly can you start?” I’ve also refined how I work, the two day commercial diagnostic as an entry point removes the risk for the founder and gives me everything I need to understand whether I can genuinely help. And I’ve learned to be honest when I can’t. That honesty builds more trust than any pitch.

Looking ahead, I want to work with three or four founders over the long term, properly in it with them, not just in the strategy conversations but in the messy middle where the real work happens. I want to be there as they build something genuinely valuable, whatever that looks like for them. I’m not trying to build a large consultancy or a team. I’m trying to do the work I’m best at, with founders who are ready to grow, for as long as it continues to produce results that matter. That feels like enough.