When Eddie started his, he had thick, luscious hair, for example.
Now, not so much.
Eddie had a modest working class but stable start in life – being the youngest of three siblings and sharing a bedroom with older brother.
At just 18 years old, Eddie joined Humberside Police as a police officer – being the youngest trainee to join the force in 2004. Four years on the front lines, countless arrests, and more dead bodies than anyone should see, including holding someone in his arms after they’d been stabbed in the neck.
Heavy stuff.
Then one day, one of his inspectors tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Eddie, you look like a smackhead. Fancy going undercover as one?”. After his training as a Covert Human Intelligence Source, Eddie went undercover (mostly buying drugs) before moving to CID, where he investigated a range of serious crimes, latterly more involved in fraud and complex crime cases.
It was during a routine call with a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer that Eddie encountered his first ‘sliding doors’ moment.
“Do you enjoy the job?”, she enquired.
“Not really” Eddie replied, “but I’m not qualified to do anything else”.
Within minutes, the lawyer suggested a post graduate access course that Eddie might (with a little persuasive writing that his experience as a copper was as good as an undergrad degree) be able to enrol on.
And, within just a week of that phone call, Eddie was enrolled at university, taking on £20k in personal debt (he wasn’t eligible for a student loan) while still working 30 hours a week as a copper.
It was an intense period in his life, to say the least.
Following completion of his post-graduate course, Eddie went on to study the Legal Practice Course at BPP University – before eventually being offered a training contract at international law firm, Addleshaw Goddard via their diversity scheme – on the basis that Eddie was from a working class background and in the first generation of his family to attend university.
And then, in 2013, after 9 years in the police, Eddie’s time came to hang up his cuffs and his badge – swapping his life jumping over fences to go work in a glass-office building in the city centre of Manchester.
Only, there was one problem.
He sat down on his first day and his immediate thought was:
“I fucking hate this”.
So, Eddie did what any tight Northerner would do that has just spent £20k on something… he gritted his teeth and knuckled down. He stuck it out to qualify as a lawyer in 2015, specialising in corporate crime.
Until just a few months later when he decided enough was enough.
Infamous words from Eddie’s then boss, a partner of an international law firm, as she announced to the team that he was leaving to start his own business. His original idea was simply: “I wanted to do something for myself, whatever that was“. He knew he’d be happier chasing his own dream, rather than building someone else’s and he knew there was really only one way of realising his potential.
In 2016, Eddie quit his law job on a Friday, started his first business the following Monday with just £10 in a bank account, a dodgy laptop, and a suit that screamed, “I know what I’m doing” (even though he didn’t).
That business, The Defence Works, grew into a multi-million-pound success, which he sold to a NASDAQ-listed company just four years later. Not bad for someone winging it from day one – without a co-founder or funding, too.
Since then, Eddie’s built several other businesses in Manchester: from flipping a 19th-century chapel into a premium workspace to co-founding a children’s sleepwear brand. He’s also behind a founder-driven productivity service designed to help neurodiverse entrepreneurs cut the crap and scale their businesses.
Eddie is well-connected in the UK startup scene and doesn’t sugarcoat the grind. He calls it as he sees it—delivering the hard truths about business with the kind of blunt honesty you’d expect from someone who was raised in Scunthorpe and became a self-made entrepreneur in Manchester.
