I'm Markus. I run OptimisedLead alongside Markus IT Support — a real, live local business — because I think you should be able to see the work before you trust the pitch.
Markus — founder. Real photo, real desk. Not a stock agency headshot.
Where this all starts
1981. A ZX81, a cassette tape for storage, and the first proper lesson I ever learned about computers: GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.
Not a phrase you hear much any more. But it's stuck with me for forty-odd years, because it's never once stopped being true. Feed a system rubbish, and no amount of clever programming saves you from rubbish coming out the other end.
Why that still matters
Most people selling AI to local business in 2026 won't tell you this: the model doesn't need to be smarter. It needs better inputs.
Understanding your actual business — what's real, what's broken, what "input" even means when you run on phone calls and habit, not spreadsheets — is the entire job. Anyone can type into a chatbot. Knowing what not to feed it is the actual skill.
Before any of this
Door-to-door sales, then telesales — the kind of job that either breaks you or teaches you how people actually decide to say yes.
From there into corporate life: Microsoft, Applix (business intelligence software, later sold to IBM), Salesforce. Learning enterprise software from the inside, not just as a user.
Building things
I joined Selling People — a UK agency giving overseas tech companies (email marketing software, web consultancies, business intelligence and CRM vendors) an actual UK market entry — as its first employee. Built the team up around me, and ended up running it as General Manager.
Separately, at Ellery Communications (2000–2004, since closed), I ran offshore customer service operations at real scale — up to 8,000 agents worldwide at one point. That's where I actually learned about process, friction, and what breaks when a system has to work across time zones, languages, and thousands of people at once.
Since then: website and lead-generation consultancy, email marketing, a CRM I built from scratch in code myself, and a spell heading up a venture capital arm investing in agritech, worldwide. Different industries. Same question every time: what's actually going into this, and is it any good?
Two honest tests, still running
Somewhere in there I also studied data science, because I've always loved statistics — not as theory, but as something you point at a real problem and watch actually work.
Football's the UK's most-followed sport by a distance, so it was the obvious live testbed: real match data, real weekly interest, enough volume to properly stress-test a statistical model against reality every weekend. That itch is why FootyOvers exists — a live football statistics app, built in two weeks with AI assistance.
Two honest tests running at once, neither settled yet. Is the statistical model actually robust against real results, week after week — not just backtested theory? And, separately: once something's built this fast with AI, can it become a genuine residual-income product, or does that only work in theory too? Early days on both. No highlight reel here either.
Still GIGO
That's the whole reason OptimisedLead exists. An AI agent is only ever as good as what you feed it, and whether a human actually checks what comes back out. Decades of watching real businesses — including my own — get that input right or wrong is worth more than any amount of prompt engineering.
I'm no AI guru, and neither is anyone else — not really. The tools are too new for that word to mean anything honest yet. What I've got instead: a genuinely long run of getting inputs and outputs right in businesses that had nothing to do with AI, plus hands-on, current practice with the AI tools that exist today. Read the full GIGO article for why that combination matters more than a fake years-of-AI-experience number.
AI helps. The human in the loop keeps it real.
That's not a strapline I picked because it sounded good. It's how Markus IT Support runs, how the AI-assisted platform I built and sold was built, and it's the rule for anything I'd ever build for you: agents draft, agents prepare, a human decides. Never the other way round.
Chesham, Buckinghamshire. Local, in the actual sense of the word — not a national franchise with a local-sounding name.