Every chapter built something the next one needed.
There was no family money and no shortcut. I spent years reinventing myself, and none of it looked like a plan at the time. DJ in the late nineties. Web design and SEO in the early 2000s. IT. Then finance systems consulting for some of London’s biggest law firms, which is where I first saw how capital actually moves, and how differently the people who own things behave from the people who work in them.
The chapter that changed everything was consulting for a boutique investment firm in London. That is where I learnt about portfolio investments and, for the first time, saw how real money is actually made: not by selling your hours, but by owning things that produce a return whether you turn up or not. While I was still consulting there I started my own Web and IT company, which was the first time I owned rather than earned.
In 2014 I made my first acquisition. The owner wanted out, there was no obvious buyer, and nobody had shown him a structure that worked for both of us. Within a year it had doubled the profits of the business I already had.
That was the whole lesson, and it arrived early: the barrier was never the money. It was that nobody had put a sensible structure in front of either side of the table. Nine more deals followed between 2015 and 2017. I founded Verdani Capital in 2018 to do it properly and at size.
Today the group runs across HVAC, Renewable Energy, Construction and managed IT services, making over £2M a year in profit and heading toward £10M group EBITDA. The founders who built those businesses are still in them. They kept equity, they kept doing the part of the job they are brilliant at, and I brought the capital architecture, the deal strategy and the right leaders to scale what they had already proved.
