Built by someone who has spent
40 years inside business —
not looking at it from the outside.

I grew up in a small business family. From the time I was old enough to understand a balance sheet, I understood that business runs on systems — and when the systems break down, money walks out the door.

When I left school in the West Midlands, UK, I started where most business careers should start: as a bookkeeper. I could see exactly where the money came from, where it went, and more importantly, where it disappeared without explanation. I went on to train as a Cost and Management Accountant through CIMA, working my way up through a series of manufacturing and distribution businesses — shirt sleeves rolled up, sitting alongside the people who ran the operations, not watching from the boardroom.

In those years I held roles as Financial Accountant, Divisional Financial Controller, and Group Management Accountant — managing teams, running month-end close, building financial models, and designing the reporting systems that told business owners the truth about their numbers. I worked inside companies ranging from defence contractors to food manufacturers to retail distributors. The businesses were different. The problem was always the same: revenue was leaking through gaps in the system that nobody had time to fix.

By the late 1990s I had a front-row seat to what was happening to business systems. ERP platforms were changing how companies operated, and I was sitting at the intersection of finance and technology — the person who understood both what the business needed and what the system had to deliver. I made a deliberate decision to formalise that dual capability and earned a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Wolverhampton.

I emigrated to New Zealand in 2004 and built a second career as a Senior Business Analyst, working on the enterprise systems that power New Zealand's largest organisations. Over the following two decades I delivered projects for Air New Zealand, ANZ Bank, ASB Bank, Vodafone New Zealand, Telstra Clear, Southern Cross Health Society, the Ministry of Health — including COVID-19 national integration systems — Callaghan Innovation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Oranga Tamariki, and others.

These were not small projects. They were ERP migrations, cloud transformations, national health integrations, banking compliance systems, and AI automation programmes. The common thread in every one of them: find where the system is failing the business, define what good looks like, and build something that works — reliably, traceably, at scale.

Here is what I have observed across forty years of working inside businesses: the gap between enterprise-grade systems and small business operations has never been wider — and never more expensive.

The pool technician running six routes in the San Fernando Valley has the same fundamental revenue problems as the corporate client I sat with in Auckland. Leads that fall through the cracks. Customers who came once and never came back. A reputation built entirely on hope rather than a system. Follow-up that depends on memory rather than automation.

The difference is that the corporate client had a team of analysts, a budget for software, and people like me to fix it. The pool tech has none of that.

TradeOS by Northmark exists to close that gap. It is not a marketing product. It is a business operating system — six integrated, automated systems covering every growth lever in a home service business: reputation, lead response, customer retention, follow-up, organic reach, and paid acquisition.

It is built on the same systems-thinking principles I have applied to enterprise projects for two decades, applied to the scale and simplicity that a home service operator needs. I did not build this because I read a book about digital marketing. I built it because I have spent forty years watching businesses bleed money through preventable gaps — and I know exactly how to close them.