ABOUT BUSINESS IQ

The problem was obvious.
Nobody was fixing it properly.

Two founders. One shared frustration. A very clear idea of what needed to change.

WHY WE EXIST

Most AI consultants start with a product.
We start with your business.

Before starting Business IQ, Lindsay and I were both working in cybersecurity, where we kept seeing the same thing happen. Companies were buying AI without a clear business case, just to say they were doing AI, whilst increasing their security risks without any clear benefit. It seemed mad.

What made it worse was that the companies selling it had no real understanding of how their customers' businesses actually operated. They were pitching features rather than solving actual problems, with claims of increased productivity and improved ROI delivered from the same generic deck regardless of who was sitting in the room. Once the dust settled from the initial deployment, none of it delivered what had been promised.
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We watched disgruntled teams disengage, management scratch their heads, and leadership looking for someone to blame rather than questioning whether the technology had ever been aligned to what their people actually needed.
So we stopped watching and built something that started where everyone else stopped.
With the business. Not the product.

Enough.

THE FOUNDERS

Two founders. Both sides of the problem.

Gareth Rees, Founder of Business IQ
Gareth Rees
Founder
Gareth spent most of his career inside organisations most people will recognise. NatWest, Coca-Cola, Sainsbury's Bank, Lloyds. Always on the tech and data side, the work that sits between what a business needs to know and the systems that should be telling it. That experience built a clear picture of how large organisations operate, where they waste capacity, and what it actually takes to get systems to change. It also made the gap between what enterprise has access to and what most small businesses are working with impossible to ignore. Business IQ was built to close that gap. We're based in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and work with SMBs across the UK and North America.
Connect on LinkedIn
Lindsay Rees, Co-founder of Business IQ
Lindsay Rees
Co-founder
Before moving into tech, Lindsay spent ten years building and running her own business. She grew it, kept it profitable, and brought it through Covid when most businesses in that sector didn't survive. That gives her something no corporate background provides, a genuine understanding of what it takes to keep a small business alive when everything is working against you. After selling, she moved into tech sales at WithYouWithMe as they launched their UK operation, then at The Missing Link, an award-winning cybersecurity firm now part of the Infosys Group. Both roles put her in front of the same pattern Gareth had been watching from the other side. Business IQ was the obvious next move.
Connect on LinkedIn
HOW WE WORK

Three things we do that most AI consultants don't.

WE START WITH YOUR BUSINESS. NOT PRODUCTS.
Every engagement starts with one question: where is your business actually losing time and capacity? Not what AI can do in general. Not what worked for our last client. What does your business need? The answer is always different, but the process for finding it is always the same.
We build foundations before we build solutions.
Most AI projects fail because they are built on top of broken processes. Automating something that does not work properly just makes it fail faster. Before anything is built, we map what exists, understand why it works the way it does, and make sure what we build is solving the right problem at the right level.
WE BUILD AS IF YOUR REPUTATION DEPENDS UPON IT.
Both of us came from cybersecurity. We know what a poorly governed AI deployment looks like from the inside, what it costs, and how quickly it can become a liability rather than an asset. Security is not a premium option or an add-on, it is the standard every deployment is built to, regardless of size or budget.
Read our AI Security Policy
HOW WE ENGAGE

Three stages.
You only go as far as you need to.

Stage 01

Find.

Every engagement starts with a diagnostic session. We map where your business is actually losing time and capacity, score each friction point by what it is costing you, and produce a prioritised output document that tells you exactly what to fix first. You keep the output whether you go further with us or not.
Stage 02

Fix.

If you want to proceed, we take the highest priority problem from the diagnostic and build the solution against it. Scoped precisely, built securely, deployed into your business with full documentation. A 90-day support period is included after every build.
Stage 03

Keep.

For businesses that want continuous improvement, Keep is a monthly managed service. New AI and automation solutions built from your backlog every month, existing ones maintained, and a rolling roadmap aligned to where you are actually taking the business. Less than £65 a day. Not a retainer, but continuous delivery.

See exactly how each stage works on our how it works page, or read what our clients say about working with us.

WORK WITH US

Here is how every conversation starts.

No pitch on the first call.
No proposal until you ask for one.
No solution until we understand your business.
Every conversation starts with your business. What it needs, where it is losing time, and what fixing that would actually mean. We go from there.
Book a callFind your friction