I studied automotive engineering at university — not because I had a career mapped out, but because I loved cars (still a petrolhead, for the record) and knew I'd stay curious about them. That instinct, picking the thing I'd happily go deep on, has shaped everything since.
While I was studying, I ran music events in local bars and clubs. The sound was always a disappointment, and as a newly-minted engineer I found that unacceptable — so I taught myself acoustic modelling and started designing and building my own speakers. That became Creative Hertz: systems I designed and built from scratch, including for clubs in Birmingham where they're still running today. I still build and run my own sound systems now, purely because I believe music should be heard exactly the way it was meant to be heard.
I graduated in 2008, straight into the recession. I trained as a project manager — and then, almost the moment my training finished, UK automotive factories shut their doors for three months and I was back out looking for work. So I went looking for industries that don't die — waste, energy, food — and waste is where the opening was. I became a commercial manager at a company supplying around 90% of the UK's local authorities — about as stable as work gets. When automotive recovered, I took that commercial and project experience back into it, growing into a global account role handling clients worldwide.
Then came the chapter that taught me the most. I joined a manufacturing business as it went through serious upheaval, and while plenty of people left, I stayed — because you learn far more when things are going wrong than when they're going right. My role was customer-facing, and that's exactly what pushed me across every part of the business: to negotiate with a manufacturer, you have to genuinely understand what you're negotiating about. So I got deep into the quality issues, the production issues, the logistics, even the financial accounting — because all of it eventually landed on the table with the client, and I was the one sitting across from them. As an engineer who understood the parts as well as the finances, I became one of the few people who could see the whole operation, end to end.
For a long time that breadth was something I built up piece by piece — learning each department in turn and assembling it into a picture. Then I was sent to investigate a newly acquired subsidiary, a financially distressed business the company had taken on, and for the first time I pointed everything I'd learned at a single problem at once. I didn't start with the accounts; that's not my background. I started where I'm strong: the product. I worked up the true cost of every part from the bill of materials, supplier invoices and timing production on the factory floor, to find where the money was leaking. Part of the answer was purely commercial — going into major German car manufacturers to renegotiate prices upward to reflect what the work actually cost. The other part was operational — redistributing the machining across the remaining UK and German sites, which let the business close one site entirely and consolidate from three down to two. Together it took a third out of the cost and secured the supply chain.
Somewhere in all that, I found my calling. It was the first time everything I'd picked up separately came together on one problem — and I realised that's the thing I love doing: deconstructing systems and problems and finding where they're actually broken. Maybe I am an engineer after all.
When the business changed hands, I knew it was time for another deliberate pivot — this time focusing on the role rather than the industry. I joined Baines Cutler as a consultant, became commercial director, and now serve as senior consultant and head of data strategy, leading the data analysis and consultancy work that goes out the door. Right now that includes designing and building a yet-to-be-launched SaaS product — the interface, the analytics, and the calculations behind them. And in my own time I taught myself algorithmic trading and a niche programming language to develop and code my own quantitative strategy — the same pattern as always: unfamiliar field, learn it properly, build the thing myself.
Baines Cutler works exclusively with schools. MLCC is where I offer the same problem-solving to everyone else — the businesses, the one-off tangles, the "we can't quite explain why this isn't working" problems. Different sector, same approach: an engineer's rigour, a generalist's range, and a genuine enjoyment of figuring out how. How it broke, how to fix it, how to make it work better.