Hello, I’m Oliver.

Where it started

I grew up in Northampton and spent most of my childhood in a swimming pool. I competed nationally, became a lifeguard before university, and taught swimming two hours a day while I studied, from babies to adults. It taught me patience, and how to give honest feedback without losing anyone.

Then came sales. My first job was selling point-of-sale software, which went well until it did not: I was let go inside my probation. It was one of the best things that happened to me, because it led to five years as an account manager at a global data company in London. The first year was brutal. By the time I left, I had grown my accounts from about £100,000 to £2 million, including joining up £40,000 of separate government contracts into a single £120,000 account.

Why I left

Sales taught me that not everyone is honest. The worst part was renewals: clients who had said they were leaving, but had not put it in writing, being renewed anyway because of a clause they had never read. I did not like what it was making me. So I made myself a rule for whatever came next: what a client pays for is exactly what they get, and I never pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.

For my last two years in the job I got up at four or five on many mornings to teach myself to work online before work started. In 2020 a reorganisation would have cut my pay, so I left a few weeks earlier than planned, in the middle of lockdown. Every client I had lined up froze for three months. I kept contacting people until they unfroze.

Why Ignite Drive

I wanted a name that felt bigger than me. To ignite something is to give it the spark it needs. Drive is the motivation, and the means, to actually get things done. Igniting your drive: that is what I want people to feel when they work with me.

It started as virtual assistant work, then marketing, then sales support. A year and a half in, I knew I wanted to do more than run other people’s social media, and when AI arrived I rebuilt the whole business around automation. That is what it does now: takes the ten hours of work nobody enjoys and gets it done in seconds.