From the inside. And a lot of it didn't sit right.
For a good while, my job was growing a web design agency. Growth manager. My role was to bring the business in and help it scale — not to dream up how they fleeced people, but I had a front-row seat to all of it.
I'll give you one real example. The same website — same work, same pages, same everything — would get sold to one customer for a grand and another for five. Not because one was harder to build. Purely because the second one had mentioned a bigger budget. Same job. Five times the price. That's not a one-off; that's the model.
The tiered packages designed to nudge you into the middle one. The £199-a-month "deals" where you never own a thing. The lock-in contracts. I was taught how all of it worked, because understanding it was part of the job.
Now — I'm not going to sit here and tell you every agency's a con, because that's not true. There are good people doing good, honest work. But the market's flooded with the same tired model: rent it forever, own nothing, get tied in, get charged whatever they reckon you'll pay. And trades are the ones suffocating under it.
I got good at that job. I just slowly stopped being able to square it.
I've been doing this on my own for a few months — helping trades with their websites, their Google, their marketing. Freelance, quietly, no big brand behind it. And people kept telling me the same thing: stop messing about and set this up properly.
I could've slapped a logo on it and started charging months ago. I didn't. I held off — on purpose — until I'd worked out how to structure it so that everyone actually wins. You and me. Not the usual setup where the agency wins and you're just locked in and hoping.
And I'll be honest about why that mattered so much: I genuinely just want a peaceful life. I can't be doing with drama, chasing, fallouts — none of it. The only way you build something with zero drama in it is to make it genuinely fair from the start. Once I'd figured out how to make it right for the client every single time — I built Graft.
So no, this isn't a bandwagon. It's the thing I wouldn't start until I knew it was fair both ways.
The people I've worked with will tell you the same thing: I don't do half-jobs. I can't. I'll go over something ten times to get it right when most would've signed it off at seven. It drives me a bit mad — but it means the work's right, every time, and it shows.
That's actually why I'm doing this at all. It wasn't even my idea to build a company — it was theirs. Enough people I'd done work for kept telling me to do this properly, for more trades, that eventually I listened.
So that's what this is now — full-time, all-in. When you work with me, you get me: my full attention, my time, and the same obsessive standard I'd want on my own business. You'll never be sat wondering if I've got time for you. This is the time.
Putting my face on things, talking about myself — it's genuinely not my comfort zone. But here's the rule I go by: I only ever put my name and my face to something when I truly believe in it. If I've stuck myself on it publicly, it's because I mean it.
So the fact that I've put my actual face and name on this should tell you exactly how much I believe in what I've built. I'm not hiding behind a faceless "agency" or a call centre — because I've got nothing to hide behind it. It's just me, and I'll stand behind every bit of it.
No pitch, no pressure. Text me and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help — and if I can't, I'll tell you that too.
Text me back