Twenty-three years, four industries, and one clarity moment.

I'll tell you about the morning I decided to do this full-time.

It was early. Not brutally early. I don't do 5am anymore, my back doesn't allow it. Somewhere around seven. I'd just dropped a customer at the airport and I was driving back on empty roads, the sky turning orange over the A303. I was tired. Not the kind of tired a coffee fixes. The kind where you realise you've been doing the wrong thing for too long.

I'd been building a new website for my own business that week. Not someone else's. Mine. And the whole drive back I was thinking about one specific detail in the booking form, some small thing that would make the whole thing click, and I couldn't wait to get home and fix it.

That's when it landed. I don't want to be doing airport runs at dawn anymore. I want to be building things that help other small businesses stop doing their equivalent of airport runs at dawn. Nestor Studio is what I've been building ever since.

I grew up in Poland. My first proper job was at a small advertising agency where everyone wore every hat in the same day. I'd sell to a customer in the morning, write the brief, design the leaflet, run the solvent printer, cut the vinyl, install it on a shop window in the afternoon, and come back to quote the next job. That's where I learned that good creative work happens when you understand the whole chain, not just one piece of it.

A lot of the customers walking through our door were new businesses. They didn't just need a logo or a flyer. They needed someone to tell them where to advertise, what to say, how to position themselves, what their first marketing spend should go on. I became that person by default because nobody else had the patience. Strategy before production, even back then. I was already building for the web around 2004: photography, a 4x4 club website, a band site for my own music project.

Then I moved to the UK. The first three years were survival mode: warehousing, building sites, whatever paid the rent. Then I got into signmaking, which brought me back to the creative side: CNC machines, UV printers, installing shopfronts in the rain. I built that into my own sign company and ran it for five years. Around 2015 I built a food ordering platform for a client in Germany, custom pizza topping selectors and all the little details that only matter when real customers are actually using the thing.

Somewhere along the way I became the co-owner of a small customer service business in Andover, alongside my business partner Stan. I'm still involved in it every day. I handle phone calls and email enquiries. I maintain the Google Business Profile. I run the social media automation. I do school runs in the morning and the afternoon because the hours suit my schedule, and I take the occasional airport run when it fits. Running that business is where I learned what every small business owner actually worries about at midnight: the missed booking, the silent inbox, the review that landed at 11pm.

For the last three years I've been focused on bringing it all together: marketing, design systems, SEO, AI tooling, automation. Quiet skill-building in the hours between school runs and bedtime. I wasn't ready to come back full-time yet, so I didn't. Now I am, so here I am.

And one project above all taught me what I build around now. A few years ago I built an online shop for friends in Poland (OlioRainbow, an artisan food brand). I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. Three months later, sales were flat because Google had never indexed a single page. My robots.txt was pointing at twenty-two sitemap URLs that didn't exist. I rewrote it, rebuilt the sitemap, rewrote all six product pages, and watched the site come back to life in Search Console. That failure is why every single site I build now gets Search Console connected before the domain goes live. If Google stops finding your site, I find out before you do. That's a promise I couldn't make if I hadn't broken it first.