About
Some people fall into sales. I fell into life first.
I left home at sixteen with no qualifications, no plan, and no particular safety net. My dad’s advice was to follow him into hotels — the job came with a room, which solved the immediate problem. The hours were long, the pay was poor, and I knew fairly quickly it wasn’t where I was headed. I just didn’t yet know where that was.
What followed was a few years of figuring it out the hard way — selling cars, door-to-door telecoms, anything that would have me. Not a conventional start, and not one I’d have chosen. But it taught me things that no classroom would have: how to read a room, how to handle rejection without taking it personally, how to find common ground with almost anyone. Those skills have never left me.
The career
Twenty years in rooms where the stakes were real.
I spent the best part of two decades in early stage Fintechs — as employee number eight at Singletrack, where I averaged 117% of target over seven years and signed the two largest deals in the company’s history. As Sales Director at Cosaic. As CCO and co-founder of Xterna, a data and analytics startup in the energy trading space. And most recently at Edison Investment Research, where I was brought in to overhaul a commercial model that had stopped working.
The thread throughout wasn’t the titles or the sectors. It was the same situation, repeated: a good business, good people, and a commercial function that wasn’t performing the way it should. Sometimes that was a process problem. More often it was a people problem — a team hiding behind their tools, a founder still carrying relationships that should have been distributed, conversations happening at the wrong level with the wrong people.
I found I was good at walking into those situations, earning trust quickly, and helping people see what was actually going on rather than what the pipeline report suggested.
The interruption
In 2020 I was diagnosed with bowel cancer.
I took six months out for treatment and recovery. It’s not something I dwell on, but it’s worth mentioning — not for sympathy, but because it sharpens your thinking about what matters and what doesn’t. The work you do, and whether it means something. The relationships you invest in, and whether they’re worth the investment. The kind of person you want to be in a room.
I came back with a clearer sense of all three.
The why
Hutility exists because of my son.
Not literally — but when I think about why I wanted to build something of my own, something purposeful, something that reflects how I actually believe commercial relationships should work, he’s at the centre of it. I want to show him what it looks like to build something you’re proud of, on your own terms.
I also coach his rugby team. It’s one of the most straightforward things in my life — you turn up, you pay attention to each kid as an individual, you figure out what they need to get better, and you help them get there. No agenda, no politics. Just the work.
That’s the same instinct I bring to a client engagement. Understand what’s actually needed. Be genuinely present. Do the work.
Where we're headed
Fractional leadership is the foundation. It won't be the whole story.
The near-term work is clear: helping founder-led businesses build commercial functions that don’t depend on the founder. But the longer-term vision is broader — an AI consulting practice built on the same principle that underpins everything else here: people first, always.
AI is changing how businesses sell, communicate, and operate. Most of the conversation around it focuses on efficiency and automation. What interests us is the human side of that equation — how people work alongside these tools without losing what makes them effective: their judgement, their relationships, their voice.
The next generation of commercial professionals will grow up with AI as a default. Some will lean on it before they’ve had the chance to develop their own instincts and style. Part of what Hutility wants to do — in time — is help them find that for themselves.
If you believe commercial relationships should be equitable, you’re genuinely curious about people, and you’re interested in what AI means for the humans who work alongside it — we’d like to hear from you.
Whether you’re interested in working with Hutility or for it, get in touch.