George Palmer - Founder, Make Advisory

The problem is rarely where the pain is being felt.

In most scaling businesses, the thing that is visibly breaking is a symptom. The missed deadline, the team friction, the costs that keep climbing. The cause is usually sitting quietly upstream, unexamined. Finding it, and fixing it there, is what I do.

How I got here

I joined Boutique Modern in 2013 as one of the first four employees. I started on the factory floor, moved into procurement, then production management, then director level. By the time I left as Operations Director in 2025, six functions reported to me: manufacturing, supply chain, construction, design, quality and maintenance, and the business had grown from £400K to £10M in revenue.

That growth was not linear or smooth. It required building functions from scratch, rescuing ones that were failing, restructuring how the business operated at almost every stage of its growth. Everything I know about operational leadership came from building it, breaking it, and rebuilding it inside a real business.

How I work

Most scaling businesses already have the answers inside them. The people closest to the work understand the constraints, the workarounds, the things that quietly don't function. I unlock that latent productivity by asking the right questions of the right people, then using what I learn to build solutions that work in practice, not just on paper.

I work alongside teams, not above them. I give an honest appraisal of what I see, early and directly. That view gets tested and shaped by the people who know the business best, and the best solutions usually come from that process. What you will always get is a straight answer.

Why Make Advisory

I founded Make Advisory because I needed this kind of partner myself. Not a firm with a methodology to sell. Not a full-time hire the business wasn't ready for. Someone who could come in, see clearly, work hands-on, and leave the business in better shape than they found it.

After years of doing that work inside one company, I became the partner I was looking for.

Who I work with

I work with two types of businesses:

Founders and leadership teams who need operational clarity. Companies that have grown faster than their systems, or that need someone to parachute into a problem and fix it properly.

Manufacturers and fabricators who want to work leaner and smarter. Businesses looking to eliminate waste, improve throughput, and build the operational infrastructure to scale.

If either of those sounds like your situation, let's talk.