I built a business.
Then I sold it.
Now I teach it.
One-to-one Business tuition for GCSE and A Level, from a teacher who founded, grew and sold a national brand before spending eleven years in the classroom. Real examples, exam-board precision, and a revision method built on the science of memory.
11 years
teaching Business in UK schools
54% A/A*
in the themes I delivered — from a cohort of 31, summer 2026
1 business
founded, grown and sold — before I taught a word of it
Experience
Taught by someone who has actually done it
Most Business teaching is second-hand. Mine is not.
In 2000 I founded Diva Cosmetics, a make-up brand aimed squarely at the teenage market, and built it into a national supplier with a team behind it. I sold the company in 2003. Since then I have mentored hundreds of business owners, written BOOM!, a book on how small businesses grow, and appeared on the BBC’s Beat the Boss.
So when we get to cash flow forecasting, break-even, market segmentation or motivation theory, I am not reading it off a textbook slide. I have made those decisions with my own money on the line, and I have got some of them wrong. That is the bit students remember — and it is the bit that turns a bland twelve-mark answer into an evaluative one.
Results
Results that stand up
In summer 2026, 54% of the 31 A Level students I taught achieved a grade A or A* in the themes I delivered.
Grades are not the whole point of an education, but they are the point of an exam. My job in our hour together is to work out precisely where the marks are being lost — knowledge, application, analysis or evaluation — and to fix that specific thing, rather than re-teaching a topic your child already knows.
Where marks go missing
- Answering the question they revised for, not the one that was asked.
- Application that names the case-study firm without ever using it.
- Analysis that stops one link too early.
- Evaluation with no judgement in it.
Method
The work between lessons is where grades are made
Here is the uncomfortable truth about tutoring. One hour a week is roughly 0.6% of your child’s week. Whatever we do in that hour, most of the forgetting happens in the six days afterwards.
Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped this in the 1880s and nobody has managed to disprove him since: without deliberate retrieval, most of what we learn is gone within a week. The fix is not more hours. It is smaller amounts of recall, spaced out, with the difficult material coming back more often than the easy material.
That principle sits underneath everything I set. Short retrieval, spaced deliberately, always written or spoken from memory rather than read.
Between lessons
I got so frustrated with revision not happening that I built an app
Setting revision is easy. Getting it done is the hard part — and chasing it turns parents into nags and tutors into administrators.
So I built Cycla. It sends your child a question on their phone. They answer by typing or speaking. The answer is marked instantly as secure, developing, weak or incorrect, and the questions they find hardest come back most often, on a schedule drawn from the spaced-repetition research. Every question comes from a dataset built directly from your child’s exam-board specification — not a generic bank.
Students get their revision in ten-minute pieces instead of one guilty Sunday. Parents get a clear view of engagement without asking. And I arrive at the next lesson already knowing what has not stuck.
Parents
Parents are part of this, not spectators
You will hear from me. After every block of lessons you get a short, plain-English note: what we covered, what improved, what is still shaky, and exactly what I have asked your child to do before we meet again. No jargon, no scores you need a glossary for.
Let’s find out where the marks are going.
Book a free 20-minute call. No charge, no obligation, and no sales pitch — I will look at a recent piece of your child’s written work, tell you honestly what I think is holding the grade back, and you can decide from there whether I am the right person to help.