My new mission

Help 100 entrepreneurs start or grow the games business they always wanted to work for

Last week, indie games publishing guru and all round lovely chap, Phil Elliot of Modern Wolf asked me:

“if someone gave you £10m, no questions asked, what would you do?”

This was a timely question. Not because I have £10m (I wish!), but as we hit Q4 of 2023, I’m mindful of it soon being a year since I left my previous business and I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what I want to do with the next phase of my career. The framing of having a large sum of money helps to liberate any constrained thinking and the answer turned out to be exactly what I want to do, regardless of having millions to play with.

This year I’ve been working with a handful of games businesses. Most notably, getting on board with Sam at Apparance and helping Ashley of IMPRESS alongside a couple of consulting gigs and giving support to my Limit Break mentees Annie and Cameron, who are both starting their own independent games studios. All the while witnessing the devastating mass layoffs happening at games industry giants across the globe and closer to home. It crushes me to see so many decent people thrown aside, purely to protect wealthy shareholder interests.

All this has highlighted to me that my biggest passion right now, is enabling more empathetic, people-focused games businesses. Which is where my self appointed mission stems from. Over the coming however-many years, I intend to help 100 people-focused games entrepreneurs start or grow their business, in the hopes of instilling a healthier and more stable growth mindset for themselves and their teams.

Lastly, in order to help shift the landscape of what games leadership looks like, I intend to work for a third of these businesses free of charge. To help people from low-income or under-represented backgrounds choose a path that has typically not been a viable option for them.I wanted to share this publicly as a lot of people have been asking me what my plan is and until now, I’ve not really had a good answer. Plus putting this out there gives me a bit of accountability to get it done, so I’ll be sharing the ups and downs over on LinkedIn and her on my personal blog. More info soon!