I became a mentor at GrowthMentor, and it is one of the roles I value most, because it lets me hand back the one thing my own path cost me the most: time. After 26 years in this industry, the lessons that hurt were never really about money. They were about the years I lost learning things the hard way that someone could have simply told me.
The career those lessons came from
My first real job was in 2003, as a web developer earning 60 dollars a month. Over the next ten years I helped grow that company from 16 to 120 people, moving between roles as the business needed. In 2014 I founded MageCloud, which is now a team of more than fifty across the UK, Denmark and Ukraine, building and scaling seven-figure stores. Every stage of that taught me something expensive, usually through my own mistakes.
The mistakes are the valuable part. Leaving a company instead of keeping some shares. Delaying a migration that should have happened a year earlier. Getting a hire wrong. None of those show up in a tidy case study, and all of them are worth more to another founder than any generic playbook, because a good mentoring session lets you borrow the lesson instead of paying full price for it yourself.
What I actually help with
The sessions that go best are specific. Which platform to choose and when to replatform. How to structure an in-house team alongside an agency. What to fix before a Black Friday spike. Where a stalled conversion rate is actually leaking. How to think about a store’s technical foundation before pouring money into ads. These are not abstract, they are the decisions I have made, or watched clients make, hundreds of times.
It is the same belief that runs through everything I write. It is why I tell people who are starting with nothing to get a job first and buy their lessons with someone else’s risk, and why a real founder story beats any amount of generated content. Experience only compounds when it is shared, which is also the thing my own clients value most: the dedication of someone who has actually been there. The odds in ecommerce are brutal, nine businesses fail for every one that makes it, and shortening the learning curve is one of the few things that genuinely moves those odds.
If you are scaling an ecommerce business and want a second set of eyes on your platform, your team, or your next big decision, that is exactly what a session is for. No pitch, just the shortcut through a mistake I already made. You can find me on GrowthMentor, or book a call directly.