Mark's Journal

You don’t raise capital from a pitch deck. You raise it from relationships. And those relationships don’t start in a spreadsheet, they start in conversations that matter. Whether you’re looking to raise capital or deploy it, one truth remains: Your network is your single greatest investment asset. At Sustainomics Capital, we’ve seen capital flow into six- and seven-figure deals not because someone filled in a form, but because they showed up, added value, and built trust over

The introduction of the Renters Reform Bill marks a structural shift in the UK Private Rented Sector. The real impact will not sit in the headlines. It will show up in the underlying economics, ownership structures, and long-term viability of portfolios that have not been built with institutional discipline. At surface level, the removal of Section 21, the move to periodic tenancies, and stronger tenant rights look like a social recalibration. Beneath that sits a far more imp

Developers spend their time building assets and investors spend their time acquiring them, yet very few step back and understand how institutional capital actually values a portfolio once it reaches meaningful scale, and that is where a significant amount of value is either created deliberately or lost quietly through poor structuring and execution. Take a £50m PRS portfolio as a working example. Not a single scheme, but a stabilised, grouped portfolio of over 200 units with

The rules shifted on 6 April. Quietly. With little attention. Yet the implications for founders and investors are significant. The UK government has expanded the scope and scale of the Enterprise Investment Scheme and Venture Capital Trusts, effectively doubling the amount that early-stage companies can raise while maintaining generous tax incentives for those backing them. At the same time, the reach of the Enterprise Management Incentive scheme has been widened, allowing m

Most investors still chase the wrong metric. They focus on price, argue over yield, and track comparables as if those numbers define performance. They do not. Serious capital allocators focus on one figure, Net Operating Income. NOI is the only number that reflects the true health of an asset. Everything else sits on the surface. In UK PRS, the gap between perception and reality is growing. Many portfolios look strong at first glance. The acquisition price feels right, the y

Your plan will fail. Your planning will not. Everyone quotes strategy. Few respect what sits behind it. You see polished plans. You do not see the thinking that built them. And that is where the real edge sits. Dwight D. Eisenhower said it plainly: Plans are worthless. Planning is everything. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder went further: No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Mike Tyson made it impossible to ignore: Everyone has a plan until they get punched

For over 20 years in data centres, I operated in a world shaped by Moore's Law. You could plan. Processing power doubled every 18 to 24 months Infrastructure roadmaps ran years ahead Risk was engineered, not guessed Outcomes were predictable We built for certainty. You invested in capacity. You scaled with confidence. You optimised for uptime. It was precise. Then the rules changed. AI does not move in straight lines. Capability jumps overnight Cost curves colla

Special Forces training often highlights a brutal statistic. Most people operate within roughly 30 to 40 percent of their true capacity. The rest sits unused. Untapped. Waiting. When I first heard this, one thought stuck with me. What a waste. I have seen the opposite during ultramarathons. When you have been moving for 17 hours. Your legs ache. Your mind tells you to crawl under a hedge and sleep. Every logical signal says stop. Yet you keep moving. Why? Not talen

Be the rock when the waves hit. Every week the headlines shift. War in Ukraine. Escalation across the Middle East. Interest rate expectations shifting again. Capital markets under pressure. The recent collapse of MFS and Century crashes add frequent reminders. Liquidity disappears faster than many investors expect. Confidence drives capital markets. When confidence weakens, capital retreats. Volatility is no longer an exception. Volatility is the

Strategic growth and systems. We are building for 2,000 PRS units by 2030. Not by chasing deals. By engineering the platform first. Scale without structure is fragile. Scale with structure compounds. Over the past 15 months we have invested heavily in a focused internal Asset Management team. Before accelerating acquisitions. Before expanding the pipeline. Before increasing leverage. We strengthened the operating core.

Be the Verb, not just the vision. Most people think intentional living means deferring life. Grind now. Endure now. Enjoy later. But that’s not intention, that’s postponement dressed up as discipline. I’ve learned (and I still relearn) that an intentional life lives on two timelines at once. You hold a long-term vision that genuinely stretches you. And you honour the short-term seasons that actually shape you. The mistake is thinking those two

The quiet power of saying NO.This week alone, I said no to: • 8 deals sent to me • 2 joint ventures • 2 investment opportunities • 9 face-to-face meeting requests • 62 emails I chose not to reply to Not because they were bad. But because they weren’t right. When you’re unclear on what you’re building, everything looks like an opportunity. When the destination is vague, every request feels urgent. And your days end up shaped by other people’s priorities, not your

Of the six books I have written, Property & SSAS Secrets stands apart. Not because it is louder. Not because it makes unrealistic promises. But because it reveals the structural machinery that serious wealth builders quietly use. This is the most detailed, commercially honest and eye-opening work I have produced. And it remains the only book dedicated solely to the combined power of SSAS pensions and UK property as a scalable wealth engine.

Most people think growth comes from saying yes to more. More meetings. More partnerships. More ideas. More “quick coffees” that somehow last 90 minutes. And let’s be honest. A quick coffee values your time at about £5. And that’s even if you don’t pay. When clarity is missing, everything looks like an opportunity. When strategy is fuzzy, every idea feels urgent. When conviction is weak, saying no feels rude.

Whether you realise it or not, your life is being designed every day. Not by grand gestures or dramatic turning points. But quietly and consistently, by the people you allow closest to you. They are the invisible architects of your thinking, standards, ambition and ultimately your outcomes.

There is a hard truth that very few people are willing to sit with long enough to change. If you are not actively building towards your own vision, you are almost certainly working to advance someone else’s. That does not make you weak. It makes you normal. For decades, the system has been designed to reward compliance, not conscious design. Security is prioritised over sovereignty. Busy is mistaken for productive. And borrowed ambition quietly replaces personal p

We live in a world that is constantly pulling at us. Notifications... Opinions... Algorithms... Everyone wants you to buy their merch, follow their framework or adopt their version of success. Very few want you to pause and ask a far more dangerous question: What do I actually want? Journalling is not about productivity hacks or pretty notebooks. It is about presence and being alone with yourself long enough to hear your own thoughts again.

I have always admired Patek Philippe for reasons that go far beyond watches. Their original line captured something timeless: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” More recently, as part of their Generations campaign, they refined the message even further: “Begin your own tradition.” That line stays with me. Because real wealth has never been about ownership.

Most founders focus on the pitch. It’s a tough truth, but one worth confronting early: most raises don’t fail due to a weak idea; they fail because the business behind it simply isn’t investor-ready. At Sustainomics Capital, we see it every day. Founders with grit, energy and vision. But also...with structural blind spots that cause experienced investors to quietly pass without explanation.

Vision Without Transmission Is a Broken Engine Entrepreneurs obsess over clarity of vision. They refine strategy decks, future maps and five-year targets. Yet, the greatest strategic error is carrying that vision alone. A founder’s clarity is meaningless if it never leaves their mind. Your accountant, solicitor and advisers cannot optimise what they cannot see. Vision becomes operational only when it becomes shared.