Most founder profiles end with London. Mine starts in Southampton and keeps coming back to it.
When I launched The Mortgage Hut in 2011, the advice I kept hearing was the same — move the head office to the City. The talent's there. The capital's there. The press is there. And it's true, mostly. But Southampton has something the City doesn't, which is room to actually build a team you trust, and to keep building one when the market turns. We're now an award-winning brokerage with 90 lenders and over 11,000 products on the panel, and a Southampton postcode hasn't slowed any of that.
Nested followed the same logic. When the property tech world asked who could lead their Southampton business, I said yes because it's the place I know best — the streets, the schools, the buyers, the agents, the local quirks that you can't pick up from a London desk. Estate agency is a hyper-local game. Pretending otherwise is how good brands die quietly.
Then there's the hospitality side — Figurati and Orange Rooms. Different industries, same conviction: the south coast deserves world-class experiences, and someone has to build them. So we do.
You can run a global advisory practice from anywhere now. I spend a serious part of every month in the Middle East working with Takeem on their UAE rental platform, and my work on Mortgage Finder helped take it to roughly half the UAE market. But the businesses live here. The board meetings happen here. The 4 a.m. when-you-can't-sleep thinking happens here.
If you're building from a so-called "secondary" city right now and someone's pushing you to move — wait. Build the thing first. The location takes care of itself.