I help owners of established businesses build companies that run without them.
Twenty years in tech and AI, an investor and board advisor, and several years now spent across the table from owners of £5M–£75M businesses. Different sectors, different numbers, remarkably similar problem.
The business works. Revenue is solid, the team shows up, customers pay. And yet every meaningful decision still routes through one person, the operating knowledge lives in a handful of heads, and growth adds pressure rather than freedom. Most owners read that as a people problem. It is almost always a structural one.
What I have learned is that growth does not fix it. The constraint that caps a business at £5M does not disappear at £20M; it reappears wearing a bigger job title. Owners who eventually do well are not the ones who grew through their problems; they are the ones who noticed the problem was the same problem each time, and fixed the underlying thing.
Removing owner dependency is the first step, not the whole job. It is the foundation for a business that is genuinely worth more: one that can scale organically, or grow through acquisition as part of a larger group, and that gives its owner real exit pathways in the future, on their own terms and timetable.
That work runs through two businesses. Exitable is where all of it happens, from removing owner dependency to building value, assembling groups and opening up exit routes. McGideon is a specific business development capability we bring to construction and building services companies, helping them win more work, waste less time and cut the admin.
Revenue going up is not evidence that the machine works. Delayed problems scale at the same rate as the business, so every year you leave one, it costs more to put right and touches more people.
Two businesses with the same profit, in the same sector, in the same year can be worth materially different amounts. The gap is structure: how much of the company still lives in the owner's head.
Almost nobody needs to work harder. They need decision rights that are explicit, systems that hold knowledge outside people's heads, and a leadership layer with the authority to actually decide.
The structure that makes a business valuable to a buyer is the same structure that makes it enjoyable to own. It creates options: sell, scale, or step back. That is the point.
The businesses
For owner-led businesses doing £5M–£75M
Smarter processes, scalable systems and autonomous leadership. Implementation, not advice. And when the right route to value is a group rather than a straight sale, Exitable builds the group too.
For construction & building services contractors
RADAR watches public tenders and frameworks, plus the private subcontract packages behind every contract award. Automation engages the buyers, drafts the bids and chases the follow-ups. No headcount added. No long lock-in.
I write weekly. If you want to follow along, the newsletter is the best way. For anything else, LinkedIn is the fastest route to me.