I install the forecasting, inventory, and supplier systems that growing food and beverage brands keep meaning to build - then stay on as the operator who runs them.
Most small consumer brands have a founder, a tight team, and no one whose job is to make the business itself run. Forecasts live in a spreadsheet that one person understands. Wholesale follow-up gets done when there's time. Co-packers chase the brand instead of the other way around. Stockouts happen on the bestsellers; slow-movers pile up in the warehouse.
I come in for a defined engagement, build the operating layer the brand should already have, and then run it on a monthly retainer until you're large enough to hire it in-house. Where it earns its keep, I install lightweight AI tooling on top - demand-forecasting agents, supplier-communication agents, inventory digests - so the systems stay run even when no one is watching them.
I grew up in the UK, read law at Cambridge, and spent three years owning operations at Proper Snacks - at the time one of Europe's fastest-growing snack brands. I left to bootstrap a legal-tech business with another lawyer from the same course; we ran it to £180k in annual revenue on the work of two people. Since 2025 I have been working as a fractional operator for a small number of clients across consumer brands and early-stage software.
I live in Vienna. Outside of consulting I write - a non-fiction book is out in the summer of 2026 - and play music with my band August and After.
I joined Proper Snacks as the ops team grew the company from a young business into one of Europe's fastest-growing FMCG brands. The demand forecast lived in a single Excel file that one person understood. The US supply chain was being set up from scratch out of Minnesota. International ops, internal legals, and B Corp certification were all open questions.
Over three years I rebuilt the forecasting and production-planning model in Excel, set up the Minnesota supply chain, owned international ops and trademarks, and wrote and submitted the environmental, anti-bribery and anti-slavery policies required for B Corp status. I recruited and trained the ops team that took the business through its next stage of growth, and led the migration off Excel onto SAP Business One.
Stock holdings reduced from four weeks of cover to two, saving roughly £120,000 a year in storage and waste. Successful B Corp certification. A working operations team and ERP in place by handover.
Read the full case study →Casehub was a legal lead-generation tool I co-founded with another lawyer from my Cambridge course, targeting UK firms looking for plaintiff-side cases driven by changes in regulation. We had no funding and no team beyond the two of us.
I built the email outreach automation, the data-analysis layer that decided which firms to target each quarter, and the operational rhythm that kept a steady pipeline running on two people's time. The work involved processing large bodies of complex regulatory information, turning it into segmented outreach, and tuning the system as response rates shifted.
Scaled to £180,000 in annual revenue as a bootstrapped two-person business, with no external capital.
VisionLeads is a Vienna-based AI development studio. As the business scaled from a handful of projects to a steadier roster, the director was spending an increasing share of every week on the unglamorous administrative work that came with growth - drafting purchase orders, reconciling against the accounts, keeping client projects tracked across email and notes.
I built them a bespoke internal system that brought ordering, financial reporting, and client tracking into one place. Purchase orders are generated and tracked from the same view that holds the client context; the financial-reporting layer reads from the same underlying data, so the books reconcile through the month rather than at the end of it.
Roughly twelve hours a month of director time recovered - the equivalent of around €17,000 a year at his billable rate - and an end to running purchase orders, accounts, and client tracking in three separate places.
If you're running a small consumer brand and your operating week is starting to look like the description above, a thirty-minute call is the cheapest way to find out whether a fractional engagement would help.