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Not many marketers start off as trade journalists, but I did. I worked at a magazine called New Media Age in the heady days of the internet and dot-com boom of 1999. I met many people launching dot-coms – big companies and startups. After four years of doing that, I took time out to travel.

Next, I worked at Marketing magazine, where I battled Mark Kleinman for the front page every week – Mark is now business editor on Sky News. My ambition was to work for the national press. I got down to the last two to join The Guardian, having done some freelancing for the Media Guardian supplement. I was unlucky, and didn’t get the role, but I suddenly had this hallelujah moment that I could go and put into practice what I’d heard and seen.

At that time, lots of people were launching websites presuming that visitors would naturally flock to them. These businesses seemed to be forgetting how and why consumers interact with brands: there needed to be some sort of utility. My approach was not to see digital as a new revolutionary media channel, and to view it as another way of engaging with consumers.

I became obsessed with how we can use the physical world to create virtual signposts to a brand’s online presence. I set up my own consultancy, initially called BCA, then ‘Evolv Digital.’ Pitching all day and working all night, we made decent money, but I quickly realized the only way you scale a consultancy is if you have a product or proposition where you have intellectual property and then you can license it. During this time, I worked for a whole load of different companies, including AOL, British Gas, N-Power, Sky and Setanta.

Setanta were a new broadcaster and they had won the Premier League rights in the UK and were going head-to-head with Sky. They wanted to build their subscription base online. They brought me in as their head of online marketing and we grew the business to 2 million subscribers.

At one point, Disney made a bid in excess of £1 bn to buy the business. The founders said ‘no.’ Six months later, the business went bust. I sold our database to Disney ESPN for a pound.

I moved to Malta to work for Betfair for a while, then came back to the UK and became digital brand director. This was ‘post IPO’ at Betfair. We launched the Betfair mobile proposition. Betfair was the first gambling operator to get an app approved in the app store.

After five years, I wanted to go and try my hand at something else. I moved to the online gifting marketplace Not On The High Street as marketing director. I enjoyed it, and we drove some really strong growth. Then Just Eat came calling: Just Eat had all the elements that I was looking for in a role. I love being around brands that are driving a positive disruption, and crucially, have a strong purpose with consumers.

What I loved about Just Eat was they were taking traditional takeaways and putting them online. This was way before Deliveroo or Uber Eats appeared. We were connecting customers with their local chippy, curry house or kebab house. Three years in, the CEO asked if I wanted to go and run Australia. It was an incredible opportunity.

The Australian business we had acquired was called Menulog and it was rapidly losing market share to Uber Eats and Deliveroo. I knew that I could go out there, apply the UK playbook and get it back into growth.