Business Ownership & Management
Building & Exiting a Product Business — TSD Ltd
TSD came about through a combination of accumulated commercial knowledge and a product gap I could see in the market. I had experience working across sourcing, category, and product roles and understood how product businesses work from the inside.
The business launched as a pure e-commerce operation, selling externally sourced product direct to consumers. Getting the foundations right at that stage mattered the platform, the pricing, the digital marketing, and the margin architecture all needed to work before there was any point in scaling. That early period was about proving the model worked and building enough commercial momentum to justify the next move.
Growth came between twelve and twenty-four months in. As volume increased the business evolved in two directions at once , outward into B2B trade accounts alongside the existing consumer channel, and deeper into the product offer itself. What started as a purely externally sourced range developed over time to include bespoke product development and, by the point of exit, a sanitaryware offer alongside the core range. That shift from reseller to product developer changed the nature of the business considerably and opened up margin and differentiation that a pure trading model simply cannot access.
Sourcing started in Europe and expanded into Asia as the range grew and supplier relationships developed. The logistics operation followed a similar trajectory from a home-based start to four third-party logistics warehouses managing a dual channel distribution operation across B2B and B2C. Managing stock investment, cashflow and working capital across that infrastructure, without external funding, was one of the more demanding disciplines of running the business. Every stock commitment was a real financial decision with real consequences.
The exit came when a trade buyer approached the business directly. By that point TSD had reached circa £1.2m turnover with a clear growth trajectory, a developed product range spanning both sourced and bespoke lines, and an established customer base across both channels. That combination was what made it attractive.
What the experience gave me, above anything else, was the reality of operating at every level of a business simultaneously. Strategy, pricing, sourcing, product development, logistics, digital, cashflow, with no buffer between the decisions and the consequences. That kind of ownership changes the way you think about commercial leadership, and it is something I bring directly into every senior role I take on.
General Management & Personal Growth
Tile Space was a different kind of role to anything I had done before. On paper, it was a commercial leadership position. In practice, it was general management of a business that didn't yet exist, inside an organisation whose headquarters were overseas and whose understanding of the UK market was, at times, quite different to the reality on the ground.
The most demanding aspect of the role was not the commercial work itself, but building the team, developing the platform, and establishing the customer base. What stretched me most was the ongoing task of managing the relationship with the international parent company. Cultural differences meant that priorities were not always aligned, and bridging that gap - keeping the parent informed and confident whilst also protecting the space needed to make the right decisions for the UK market .
At Tile Space, on a fairly regular basis, you had none of those things. Getting comfortable with that ambiguity — learning to make a sound call with what you have and move forward rather than waiting for certainty that may not arrive — was one of the more valuable things the role gave me.
It also taught me a great deal about prioritisation. When you are building something from nothing whilst simultaneously being held accountable for its commercial performance, the list of things that need attention is always longer than the time available to address them. Working out what genuinely matters on any given day, and being disciplined enough to focus there rather than spreading effort too thinly, is a skill that sounds straightforward but takes real experience to develop properly.
I left Tile Space more self-reliant and more rounded as a leader than when I arrived. The experience of operating without a peer group, managing upwards across a cultural divide, and holding a business together whilst building it at the same time prepared me directly for what came next, founding and scaling TSD. The ambiguity I encountered at Tile Space made the uncertainty of running my own business considerably easier to navigate.