Your business runs on tech whether you chose it or not.
I fix the stuff that should be working but isn't.

A practice of one, on purpose.

I'm Ismail. Most people have someone in their life who always seems to have figured out the clever way to do something with tech. The person you call before you spend money on a solution, because they've probably already found a better one. That's the role I play, except for businesses, and properly.

Clients often spot my setup before they understand what it's doing. They'll see something on my screen or my phone and ask how it works, can they have it, can I set them up. That curiosity is usually where good work starts. I introduce people to tools they didn't know existed and workflows that make their previous way of doing things look unnecessarily hard.

Before this, a decade in demanding commercial environments: Harrods, Peter Reed across Hong Kong, Seoul, Moscow and Milan, then senior project management at SGK for a global FMCG client. The pattern repeated in every one of those roles. I'd find the thing nobody had actually been asked to fix, and I'd fix it anyway, without waiting for someone to commission it or hand it down to me.

I work out of Newcastle. Most of what I do is remote, so location doesn't really matter, but I'm building relationships in the North East first, before anywhere else. There's no junior account handler and no phone line that isn't mine. If you call, or you're waiting on an email at half nine on a Wednesday night, that's me, not someone junior covering for me.

The name comes from two places. In graphic design, the margin is the space that makes everything else readable, the part that does its job by staying out of the way. And there's the older habit of writing in the margins of a book or a notebook, where the notes that actually matter tend to end up. Neither is the main event, but both are usually what makes it make sense.