I’ve spent 26 years understanding how money and business actually work - not in theory, but from the inside.

I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and have since worked as a Finance Director and Managing Director, built businesses of my own, scaled businesses and exited them.

I’ve been responsible for the numbers when the numbers were good and when they weren’t. I've built things and then rebuilt them. I’ve made decisions I was proud of and decisions I wasn’t. I’ve experienced success, and I’ve experienced the kind of failure that teaches you more than the success ever did.

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing something the accounts couldn’t explain.

Capable, intelligent people - including me at various points - making the same self-defeating financial decisions again and again, in full knowledge that they were self-defeating.

Undercharging while knowing exactly what they were worth. Spending in ways that undid months of good work in days. Avoiding the ask, the price rise, the visibility despite having all the skill and experience to do it.

That question took me somewhere I didn’t expect.

I trained formally in therapeutic and behaviour-change approaches, alongside years of study into identity, beliefs and behaviour, because I wanted to understand the mechanism, not just describe the symptom.

What I found was how much of our money behaviour has very little to do with the numbers.

It's shaped by what money came to mean to you, what you learned you were allowed to have, and what you came to believe about yourself along the way.

That’s the intersection I work in now: hard financial and business experience on one side; identity, behaviour and perspective on the other.

Most conversations about money separate the numbers from the person making the decisions. I don’t think they can be separated for long.

Strategy and numbers. Psychology and perspective. Clarity and confidence. All of it connected.