UK Roller Shutters.

In October 2013, I co-founded UK Roller Shutters in Wombourne, near Stourbridge in the West Midlands. We supply and install roller shutters, fire shutters, steel doors and security grilles for homes, warehouses and industrial sites.

On paper I was the first employee. My title was Digital Marketing and Business Development, because the career angle I was building at the time was the digital side. In practice, I was a founding partner. I went on to take the Digital Marketing Director title in 2017 and ran the digital side until 2018.

The digital marketing did not start with me alone. We began by working with an external agency, and I set out to learn everything I could from them. Then I brought the work in-house, took it on myself, and ran it from there.

A service-led company supplying, installing and maintaining bespoke roller shutters, fire shutters, steel doors and security grilles across the UK. We work with domestic homeowners, commercial premises, industrial warehouses, and agricultural sites. Every shutter is made to measure. Every install is fitted by our own engineers. Every shutter we have installed has a maintenance contract behind it.

The work itself is unglamorous and operational. Quoting, manufacturing, scheduling, installing, servicing. There is no script. Every site is different.

It is the kind of work that does not show up in tech panels or LinkedIn posts. It also pays for itself, compounds with reputation, and does not get disrupted by an AI startup pitched at Y Combinator.

The digital marketing did not just win us work down the road. A global search and content strategy took the product around the world. Our shutters ended up shipping to Hong Kong, Dubai, Mauritius and beyond.

Going global meant solving problems with no off-the-shelf answer. A client in Hong Kong needed a shutter that kept the flies out in summer and the typhoons out in winter. Nothing like it existed, so we designed a dual-screen roller shutter, had it manufactured, and sold it. We did a lot of that: designing products to order when the market had none.

This is the business that taught me what most operators have to learn the hard way. How to do real work, with real customers, with real money on the line.

I learned to think on my feet in an industry with no room for hesitation. These were multi-million pound contracts with penalty clauses, where a delay on site meant a fine. You get good at solving problems quickly when the alternative is expensive.

I learned the messier side of business too. Construction firms that went bust owing us thousands, and what you actually do next when that happens.

I learned to build the operation behind the service. A national network of subcontractors so we could survey, install and maintain across the country, around the clock.

And I went deep on the digital craft: technical SEO, content, paid media and conversion optimisation. We had started with an agency, but by the end I ran all of the marketing myself, with no agency on retainer, because I had learned how to.

When I co-founded Snippet Digital seven years later, I brought all of it with me. The systems thinking. The customer obsession. The unwillingness to ship a deliverable I would not want to receive.

UK Roller Shutters is still a business close to me. It is also the foundation under everything I have built since.