My dad loaned me the money to buy that first batch of chocolate and drinks. It was the first business loan I ever had, arranged without paperwork, credit checks or interest. It gave me my first lesson in business: somebody may help you begin, but what happens next is your responsibility.
From August 2005, throughout childhood and into university, I kept starting small ventures: selling at school, cleaning neighbours' cars for money, car boot sales growing up, and side hustles alongside my studies. Each did well in its own respect, and every one taught me something about customers, margins, risk and resilience. Business was never something I discovered later in life. The instinct had always been there.
Life beyond those early ventures was turbulent. I attended St. Monica's High School. In March 2012, when I was 15, I lost my mum, Michele, to breast cancer. I left school that July and carried the loss into adulthood, and in September 2014 into the University of Salford, where I began studying architecture.
Architecture taught me far more than how to design buildings. It trained me to respect detail, understand how systems connect and transform an empty space into a workable vision. It taught me research, presentation, problem solving and the discipline of revising an idea repeatedly until every element served a purpose.
In July 2015, at 19, my best friend died in a motorbike accident. Grief derailed my second year and I came close to losing my place at university. But I recovered, graduated in July 2017 and continued directly into a two-year Master's.
During my Master's, I explored how design could create opportunity for young people who felt disconnected from education and society. In July 2019, the month I graduated from the Master's, that journey took me to a summer placement at Harvard University and MIT, an experience that felt almost impossible considering how close I had come to leaving university altogether.
In August 2019, aged 23, I entered the Manchester Evening News and Salboy competition to win a £150,000 apartment. Entrants had to propose a creative scheme that would benefit Salford's surrounding community. My proposal continued the work behind my Master's thesis: helping young men like me move away from the streets and towards education, purpose and opportunity.
I reached the final and finished as runner-up.
At the time, it felt like the greatest professional loss of my young life. I believed winning could provide security and perhaps the platform from which everything else would begin. Losing taught me something more valuable: no competition, employer or institution was going to discover my ambition for me. Nobody else could find the hunger inside me, and nobody was coming to hand me my future.
Architecture had not rejected me. In October 2019 I was offered two architecture jobs and turned them both down. There was something inside me that knew I could not spend my life working for somebody else. Ironically, the only boss I ever had was my dad.
Instead, I went to work for his cleaning company as a delivery driver. On paper, it looked like a dramatic step backwards: from architecture, a Master's degree and Harvard to loading cleaning products into a van. There was no impressive title, carefully designed studio or obvious career path. But sometimes the route towards your future looks nothing like progress while you are travelling through it.
In December 2019, during one ordinary delivery, I came across a second-hand fire extinguisher.
To anybody else, it was an old piece of equipment.
To me, it looked like the beginning of something.
From that point I built Freedom Fire as a sole trader, and on 27 August 2021 it became a limited company. Over the years that followed we went on to establish rapid ecommerce growth, becoming number one for fire extinguishers on eBay and number one on Temu.
We endured more loss along the way: another close friend when I was 27, and my sister-in-law when I was 28. Through the hardship, even when the chips were down, we carried on, and became the start of what we like to call a £100 million enterprise.
That moment closes the story before the business and begins the Freedom timeline. See the timeline →