THE BUSINESSES.

Selbit & Co. is a magic emporium opening soon in Suffolk — magic, tricks and curiosities, named after P. T. Selbit, the British magician who invented sawing a woman in half and edited The Wizard magazine from 1905 to 1910.

I started out as a professional entertainer. This is me coming back to that side of things properly: a real shop, built in public, for working magicians and anyone who's ever wanted to learn a trick.

This brand is just me. Just me working in it, while the UK government decide what they're doing. Sometimes it's not about the change you make 🪙🪙 but the change you make 👏🏻👏🏻

Coming soon. Opening in Suffolk.

The Wizard is a revival of P. T. Selbit's periodical, first published from 1905 to 1910.

It's the subscriber magazine of Selbit & Co. — for working magicians and newcomers alike. A modern series, picking up the name he edited more than a century ago.

Coming early 2027.

Pan-Asian quick-service restaurant brand. Serious bao, serious flavour — fluffy steamed buns, loud branding and a menu built for speed.

This is the food brand that taught me most of what I know about margins, staffing and marketing on a shoestring. Everything behind the counter — the menu engineering, the upsells, the weird little promotions — gets documented on the channel. Expect the wins, the walkouts and the health-inspection surprises.

THE IPSWICH CALL: we were the first to pull out of Tower Street in Ipswich. Not because one bad month spooked us — because the numbers said the food hall wouldn't last a year, and I said so out loud at the time. Nine months later, it closed. I feel sorry for the other traders who stayed and kept losing thousands, but that's the difference between hope and judgement.

A great entrepreneur doesn't just see next month — they look a year, five years, ten years down the line. Your dreams will cloud your judgement and hand you a gambler's fallacy: keep pumping money into something that will never work, for reasons outside your control. Sometimes the best thing you can do is retreat, recalculate and regroup.

THE FELIXSTOWE ENDING: we closed the Felixstowe site. The model didn't suit seasonality — Felixstowe is a town that swells in the summer and empties in the winter, and the numbers only ever worked for half the year. A quick-service model that can't carry its quiet months is a business that's already dying slowly; we chose to close that location on our terms instead.

The brand itself is very much alive — Big Bro Bao is now franchising, taking the concept to operators who want to run it in their own towns.

THE LESSON: run daily dashboards and stay on top of your data. Trust your data — it will never lie. (And if you want a hand building your dashboards, reach out to Serventi and they'll help you with it.)

A modern jacket potato concept built from a small seaside kiosk. One hatch, one oven, and a queue that forms whatever the weather.

Tubby Spud is my live experiment in ultra-lean food retail: minimal footprint, maximum personality. Every number — spuds sold, waste, weather vs footfall — goes up on the channel, because a kiosk is the most honest business you can run.

An independent-first local delivery platform designed to keep more money circulating within local communities.

MunchMob exists because the big delivery apps take a chunk small businesses can't afford. We're building the opposite: lower commissions, local riders, community first. It's the hardest build of the lot — and the most public one. The whole thing is being documented from the first line of code to the first payout.

UPDATE: we're close. Venue onboarding is happening right now — independent restaurants, cafés and takeaways are signing up to go live on MunchMob. The platform is built, the first venues are coming on board, and launch day is nearly here. Watch this space, because when we go live, you'll see it documented here first.

Bespoke software, websites, ordering systems and technology built around how businesses actually operate.

Every system I needed and couldn't buy, I ended up building — ordering flows, kitchen screens, booking tools. Serventi is where those become products for other operators. If you've ever thought 'why does no software work the way my business works' — this is the answer.

Immersive events and experiences currently being reworked and evolved.

Forty-plus events in, we learned the hard way that bespoke doesn't scale. Lock & Legend is being rebuilt around a repeatable model — and the rework, the numbers, the mistakes and the reasoning are being shared in full. Watch this space. Literally.

In 2018, I launched SexxxBox, an adult retail brand selling both direct-to-consumer and B2B.

Rather than simply reselling the same products as everyone else, I worked directly with manufacturers in China to develop unique products, teaching myself overseas sourcing, product development, importing, supply chains and international logistics along the way.

We built multiple routes to market — selling directly to customers online while also supplying products B2B to other retailers.

Marketing in the adult industry meant thinking differently. With many traditional advertising channels restricted, I leaned heavily into influencer and creator marketing, working with creators on OnlyFans and a range of adult content actors to put products directly in front of highly relevant audiences.

It became a crash course in product development, international sourcing, e-commerce, wholesale, unconventional marketing and customer psychology.

After three years of building the brand, I sold the business in 2021.

Different industry. Same fundamentals: find the audience, build the product, create the channels, grow the brand — and build something somebody else wants to buy.

When COVID-19 shut down my events and festival business, I needed to pivot — fast.

After being refused access to one of the UK's major delivery platforms, I decided to build my own. JustDrink was born.

An on-demand alcohol delivery platform, built from the ground up to get drinks directly to customers' doors at a time when home delivery was exploding.

The name didn't go unnoticed. I received a cease-and-desist from a major "JUST" delivery platform, challenging the JustDrink brand. I fought it, successfully defended our position, and continued trading under the name.

Over the next two years, I grew the platform before successfully selling the business in 2022.

Founded from a rejection. Challenged by a giant. Sold two years later.

Not bad for a Plan B.

In 2018, I launched The Rabbit Hole, a specialist events brand producing parties for the swinging and alternative adult lifestyle community.

Building events in a niche like this meant understanding far more than simply selling tickets. We had to create a trusted brand, build a loyal community and deliver an experience where guests felt comfortable, safe and able to enjoy themselves without judgement.

With mainstream advertising opportunities limited, growing the business meant finding unconventional ways to reach the right audience and turn that audience into a genuine community.

The Rabbit Hole gave me hands-on experience in event production, ticketing, venue operations, hospitality, community building, database growth and niche marketing.

In 2020, I sold the brand, customer database and associated assets to another operator, who continues to run the business today.

The product wasn't just the party. The real value was the brand, the trust and the community built around it.

Joey's Java was my first restaurant brand — launched in 2020 during COVID, from the back of a food truck.

While hospitality was shut down, the truck kept trading. It grew, and grew, until it became a bricks-and-mortar restaurant — and then one of the top 3 restaurants in Essex.

But the numbers don't care about rankings. I sat down and did the research properly: running the concept over the winter wasn't profitable, and as hospitality reopened and competition came back, the concept just wasn't favourable.

So I closed it. First proper restaurant brand, top 3 in the county — and still a business that had to die before it took me down with it.

That's the lesson: a business that can't survive its weakest season isn't a business. It's a countdown.

53 Fobbing was a restaurant brand I founded in 2022 — a proper restaurant, built from nothing into a living, breathing business.

Then came the fallout with my business partner.

In 2023, I walked away. No payout, no deal, no drama I wanted any part of. I just didn't want to be involved anymore.

Will I ever say what I walked away from? No. Was it tens of thousands? Was it hundreds? All I'll say is it was enough that walking away hurt — and I'd do it again, because peace of mind has no price tag.

The restaurant is still trading today, and I genuinely wish them all the luck. I'm proud to have been part of the foundations — because whoever's running it now is building on something I started.

Lesson: partnerships are marriages with money involved. Choose your partner like your life depends on it — because your business does.