MARKETING · STRATEGY · AI · DELIVERY · CHRISTCHURCH
The strategy was never the hard part.Doingitwas.
I help small New Zealand businesses make the call and then build the thing. Marketing strategy, operations, and AI systems that actually ship. The work a six-person agency quotes for, done by one person who’s run it for real, inside a regulated firm, with money and compliance on the line.
Currently working with financial advisory firms and hospitality operators across New Zealand.
Marketing.
Positioning, pricing, brand, campaigns, the strategy that actually moves something. I find the one or two decisions that matter, name the trade-offs out loud, and help you make the call. Then we do it. That last part is the part most people skip.
AI.
Four years building production AI inside a regulated financial firm, where a wrong answer isn't a funny screenshot, it's a compliance problem. Custom Claude workflows, automations, internal tools, agentic systems. The layer that lets a small team move like a much bigger one, on a one-person invoice.
Delivery.
I'm not a deck. I do the work, or I sit at the desk next to the person who does until it's running. No hand-off to a junior. No 60-page report you'll never open. The thing gets built, and it leaves my hands working.
A designer who kept following the problem.
Twenty years, four industries, one habit.
I trained as a graphic designer and spent the first part of my career doing that, including running the in house studio at Ballantynes. I was good at making things look right, but I kept getting pulled towards the thing underneath: why the campaign was not working, why the process was slow, why the good idea never made it out the door.
So I followed that. Marketing, then fundraising at the Christchurch City Mission, then a couple of years leading fundraising at Cholmondeley Children’s Centre. The work was always the same underneath. Find what is actually broken, fix it, and build something that keeps working after I have gone.
For the last few years I have been inside a small financial advice firm, running operations and compliance and learning an industry I knew nothing about when I started. That is where I got into AI properly, not as a buzzword but because it was the best tool I had found for the dull, fragile, manual work that slows a business down. I build things that run every day on real client data, in a regulated firm, where getting it wrong has consequences.
I am finishing an MBA at Canterbury. I get bored easily, I work best with a few problems in front of me at once, and I would rather tell you the truth than the comfortable version. That is the whole story really: marketing, operations, and AI, done by someone who has actually run the kind of business you are running.
Two ways to start.
Depending on how stuck you are.
The Audit
I work out where the business actually is (not where the org chart says it is), find the highest-leverage move, and tell you what AI can realistically do in the next 90 days. A short, sharp written brief and a working session. Not a report nobody reads.
Suits: Owners weighing up a rebrand, a repositioning, an ops overhaul, or a first real move into AI.
The Engagement
Marketing strategy and the build, in one pair of hands. Positioning or system design, the audience and process work, the channel or automation call, then implementation and the numbers to prove it moved. I stay until it's running properly, and built to keep running.
Suits: A launch, a rebrand, a growth phase, or an AI build that needs both a strategy spine and someone to actually make it.
Twenty years.
One pattern.
Christchurch, NZ
Design studio, then a city mission, then a children’s charity, then a financial advice firm. Different industries, same job every time: walk into something broken or half-built, work out what it actually needs, build it, and leave it running.
The last three years I did that inside a regulated practice. Compliance, operations, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a firm legal and alive. Somewhere in there I started building AI tools to do the work, and they turned out to be the most valuable thing I’d ever made. Now they’re the core of how I work.
The edge isn’t that I know about AI. Plenty of people will talk to you about AI. It’s that I’ve been running it in production, with real client data, in an industry where getting it wrong has consequences. The rest is just marketing and strategy, done by someone who’s sat in the chair you’re sitting in.
Let’s figure out where you’re stuck.
No forms. No funnels. No discovery call to book a discovery call. Just an email. Tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you straight whether I can help. And if I can’t, I’ll usually know who can.
Christchurch, New Zealand