Hello — I'm Ian.
I run Berko Digital.

I've spent twenty years building businesses. I founded and ran Beyond, the UK's leading funeral marketplace and 5-star will-writing platform, through to acquisition by Dignity PLC. Before that I scaled Pollen, an event-tech business, from a small festival agency to 800-plus staff and the #7 spot on the Sunday Times Tech Track 100. Earlier in my career I was the third employee at a startup that scaled from zero to 3,000 sites and a £47m exit.

Along the way, the brand and product work my teams produced won CreativePool Brand of the Year and a Drum Advertising Award — Beyond's brand is written up here if you want to see it. So when I tell you a website needs to look like the business deserves, that isn't an afterthought to the technical work — it's the part that makes a customer pick up the phone in the first place.

Most digital agencies are run by people who are brilliant at design or clever with code, but who've never had to make payroll, win clients, or grow revenue under real pressure. I have. For two decades. That changes how I think about your website. It's not a creative project. It's a business tool.

When I look at your digital presence I'm not asking "what would look nice?" — I'm asking: where are the lost enquiries? What's the slowest part of your customer journey? What would I fix first if this were my business? Those are business questions, not design questions, and they're the ones that actually move the needle.

I work largely through AI-assisted workflows — the same approach I used to build Capo, a casual football app launched in 2026 and now used by players across 13 countries. Web app, API, native iOS and Android — built single-handed with AI tooling. (If you're technically curious, the full build-in-public series is on the Capo blog.) That's the reason I can tell you confidently what AI can — and can't — do inside a small local business. It's not something I read about in a newsletter.

For a local business website, it means I deliver in days what traditional agencies take weeks to produce, at a fraction of the cost. It's why the prices are on the website and the turnarounds are quick.

What AI can't replace is judgement, taste and the experience of knowing what actually works for a business like yours. That's what you're really paying for. The efficiency just means you don't also have to pay for it to be slow.

The sites I build use modern frameworks (Astro, where it suits) and are engineered for sub-second performance on a phone. This site is a fair example. WordPress, Wix and Squarespace can be the right tool for some sites — but when a local business needs to be found instantly on a customer's phone, the modern stack wins comfortably on speed, SEO and AI readiness. Happy to show you the live Lighthouse score on the call, alongside yours.

Because I deliver everything personally, I keep the book deliberately small — small enough that every client gets senior attention from start to finish, not handed off to a junior the moment the contract's signed.