The technology keeps changing. The problem underneath it never does.

Every few years, a new technology arrives and creative businesses get excited. Then confused. Then frustrated. Digital did it. Automation did it. AI is doing it now.

The pattern is always the same. Leadership announces the strategy. Teams are told to adopt the tools. Nobody stops to ask whether the way work actually gets delivered can support what they're trying to do.

That's where I work. Not with the tools. With the system underneath them. I look at how work flows from the moment something lands to the moment it leaves, find the points where it depends too heavily on people to hold it together, and fix those first. The technology comes in after. When it does, it fits, because the foundation is ready.

I've watched this pattern play out across three technology waves now. I don't think it's going to stop repeating itself. I've just got good at recognising it early.

I am not teaching theory. I am redesigning workflows.

I started building websites before most people knew what they were. In 2000, I launched Target Online, a digital consultancy that helped agencies deliver work they'd sold but didn't yet know how to build. Grew it to 100 people. Sold it.

After that, companies kept asking for the same thing. Not the building. The fixing. Something in the way work moved through the team wasn't right, and they needed someone who could see it and sort it out.

At one agency, I arrived expecting to run project management. On day 1, they told me the operations director had left suddenly and the job was mine if I wanted it. I said yes. That's been the shape of most of this career: something needs fixing, and I find I can see what's wrong faster than most people expect.

At Engine, I rebuilt how work was scoped, resourced, and tracked. Within a year, 80% of projects were landing on time and on budget. Profit jumped 2 points. By year 2, they were the most profitable part of the group. At Entain, the design talent sat in separate teams across the brands. I brought them together, reshaped the skill sets around what the work needed, and built Wave Creative: a 380-person function running campaigns across 4 continents and 27 brands. More than £20 million in combined savings by year 2.

Some of the creative work won awards along the way. It could only happen because someone had sorted out the operations underneath it first.

Those numbers matter. What I actually remember is watching teams stop working harder than they should have to, because someone had finally looked at the system they were working in and changed it.

These days, that includes my own business. I started Chofski Consulting to do this work for other people, and I run it on exactly what I teach. Everything I've learned about AI goes into how the business actually works day to day, the reporting, the content, the admin that used to swallow a week. I don't put anything in front of a client that isn't already running here first.

I don't sit still. I see something and think: I wonder what that could do for the work. That instinct is how I built my career, and it's still how I work now.

I love it when a plan comes together. Not just the result. The whole process: the diagnosing, the figuring out, the unexpected problem halfway through that forces you to think differently. That's the bit I find genuinely satisfying.

Creative work has always been part of my life, whether that's been at work, protecting and delivering other people's creative visions, or outside it, making things with my hands. I have a pottery studio in my garden and I spend a lot of time in it. There's something about shaping something from scratch, one deliberate step at a time, that feels right.