I qualified as a nurse in 1997. Not a strategist. Not a consultant. A nurse — making decisions fast when someone's life depended on getting it right. A&E teaches you things no amount of business training can. It teaches you to triage. To work out what's going to kill the patient first and deal with that before you worry about anything else. To stay calm when everything is loud.
What most people don't know is that I kept doing clinical work — as part of a medical services team — until 2007. From 2004 I started moving into healthcare business development alongside the nursing. So for three years I was doing both. The full transition into transformation and commercial roles came in 2007.
From 2007, I moved fully into healthcare transformation and bid management. Seventeen years of winning contracts, leading programmes, and building things inside some of the UK's largest healthcare organisations. I managed virtual bid budgets up to £1.8 million. I built £32 million in personal sales. At Optum — part of United Health Group — I led a programme that cut daily service overruns by nearly two hours and achieved a 42% reduction in patients having to repeat their information to multiple staff.
In 2020 I left. I founded JQ IQ and Dot Alt Events — two businesses, from scratch, on my own. No safety net. And a very clear view that AI tools were the only way I could compete at the level I wanted to without a team behind me.
What followed was expensive and instructive. I made most of the mistakes you can make. The turning point came building BeatsBingo — my music bingo app. I'd been throwing instructions at AI tools and hoping for the best. When it all fell apart I went back to basics. Stopped. Spent three or four days writing everything down properly. Process flows, usage models, the lot. Then went back and said: right, this is what you actually need to build. Working version in two days.
The AI is not the hard part. The thinking is. Most people already know how to write a brief. They just forgot to apply it here. That's what I help with.