Why I write about this

Every business starts with curiosity — the desire to understand how things work, and how they could work better. I've spent years building, acquiring, and investing in businesses across cleaning, logistics, marketing, property and software. AI is what changed how I run all of them.

When AI started to become genuinely useful, I didn't go looking for a course or a case study — I pointed it straight at the businesses I already owned. Rotas, invoicing, customer comms, reporting: the parts of running a company that eat a founder's week. That's where I started experimenting, breaking things, and fixing them again, inside real operations with real customers.

What worked, stuck. Across the portfolio, AI now handles the admin that used to slow teams down, catches problems before they become complaints, and frees people up to do the work that actually needs a human. Plenty of it didn't work, too, and those attempts cost me time and money before I found out.

Word got around. Friends running their own businesses started asking how I'd done it, and I noticed the useful part was never the system itself — it was the explanation. What it actually does. Which tool was worth paying for. Which bit I got wrong the first time. That's the part nobody seems to write down, so I started writing it down myself.

That's what Geats Notes is. Every week, a briefing on what actually moved and what to do about it — no hype, no launch-day breathlessness. Once a month, I take one system apart properly: what it does, how it's built, what it costs you to run. Sometimes that's something running in one of my businesses right now. Sometimes it's a platform I've been trying out that I think you should know exists. I'll always tell you which, because advice you can't weigh is worth nothing.

I'm not chasing AI hype, and I'm not going to tell you AI will run your company for you. I'm doing what I've always done: trying things where the stakes are real, keeping what works, and being straight about what didn't.