The Words Came Back

My dad trained as a mechanic but gave it up to run a corner shop. He still fixed cars on the side. Couldn't help himself. Classics were his thing. AC Cobras, engines you could hear from three streets away. A big Shammi Kapoor fan who loved music. A storyteller. A laugh. The kind of man who made everyone feel on top of the world just by walking into the room. Generous, soulful, happy go lucky. A decent geezer in every sense of the word.

He died in 2022.

The words stopped.

I don't mean I went silent professionally. I kept writing board papers, strategy decks, investor updates, regulatory submissions. The machinery of work doesn't pause for grief. If anything, it accelerates. You fill the void with productivity because productivity doesn't ask how you're feeling.

But the other words stopped. The ones where you say what you actually think. Where you put a stake in the ground and defend it. Where you risk being wrong in public.

I'd spent twenty years building a career across healthcare, insurance and technology. NHS surgeon. Strategy consultant. M&A director. Venture builder. Insurtech founder. I had plenty to say. I published nothing that was mine.

Grief does something unexpected. It doesn't just take. It strips. It removes the layers of performance you didn't realise you'd built up. The careful positioning. The professional voice that sounds authoritative but says nothing dangerous. The instinct to hedge every opinion until it's safe enough to be meaningless.

When my dad died, I lost the energy for all of that.

Three years later, something shifted. Not dramatically. No epiphany in the shower. No motivational quote on Instagram. Just a slow realisation that the most valuable thing I could offer wasn't another framework or another data point. It was what I'd actually learned. The hard way. In rooms where the stakes were real and the outcomes were mine to carry.

I built Peachy from scratch. Not just a regulated MGA with FCA authorisation and underwriting capacity from Sompo International. A full insurtech platform. Serverless, composable, API-first, infrastructure as code. Data in motion. Compliance by design. I learned that navigating regulators isn't Kafkaesque if you understand what they're actually looking for. I also learned that building a company from nothing will test every assumption you've ever had about yourself.

Before that, I was Strategy and M&A Director at Bupa and a venture builder. I led the divestment of a £450M healthcare business, running the operational and financial turnaround to prep it for sale. EBITDA from negative £3.5M to positive £6M. Delivered at 2.3x above Board expectations. The numbers sound clean. The process was brutal.

Before that, I was a strategy consultant at L.E.K. Not just to understand healthcare. To understand how big private and listed businesses work and grow. I wanted commercial and strategic muscle. The high of doing deals and getting them across the line with a keenly tested business plan and a synergy realisation strategy that actually held up.

Before that, I was an NHS surgeon. I operated on people. Taught anatomy at Oxford. Built a telemedicine solution for kids with cancer that won the Time/KPMG Business Award. Designed a smart card EMR called Med e-card that won business plan competitions. Then walked away from clinical medicine because I wanted to understand systems, not just the patients inside them.

I've invested in my own learning throughout. Continuous, curious, compounding.

All of that gave me something. Not expertise, exactly. Perspective. The kind you only get from sitting in enough rooms, making enough decisions and watching enough things go sideways to develop a sense for what actually matters versus what looks good on a slide.

What Bionic is

Bionic is where I write about what happens when human judgment meets artificial intelligence. When boards try to govern technology they don't fully understand. When startups try to disrupt industries that are regulated for good reason. When the promise of AI meets the reality of implementation.

I'll write about healthcare, insurance, health insurance, AI, digital transformation and whatever sits on the periphery. Not from the consultant's podium. From the arena.

The name is deliberate. Bionic means augmented. Human capability, enhanced by technology. Not replaced by it. That's the bet I've made with my career. It's the bet I think the best companies are making too.

Some of what I write will be about the industry. Data, trends, what the research says. Some will be about what I've seen and done. The mistakes. The lessons. The things nobody puts in the case study.

I won't hedge everything into safety. I won't pretend I have all the answers. But I'll be specific, sourced and honest.

Why now

Because the words came back.

And because the world I work in is moving faster than the conversation about it. Boards are making decisions about AI without understanding what they're deciding. Startups are building products without understanding the regulatory landscape. Consultants are selling transformation without understanding what transformation actually costs.

I've been in all three of those rooms. I have something to say.

My dad never wrote a word for public consumption. He told stories instead. Made people laugh. Made them feel like they mattered. Put Shammi Kapoor on the stereo and lit up every room he walked into. For decades. No fanfare. No audience. Just him. I can't match that. But I can try to do the same thing in a different way. Put something useful into the world. Be specific. Be honest. Show up.

Bionic starts now.