The maths never worked until I stopped being the worker
4 min read · 863 words ·
It was a Tuesday evening. Kids in bed, laptop open, a rough idea in my head and about ninety minutes before I'd be too tired to think straight. That's the budget. That's always been the budget.
I've been a Client Director at Computacenter for over a decade — Gaming and Entertainment sector, enterprise IT sales. Flutter, Entain, the big names in iGaming and sports betting. It's a demanding job, one I'm genuinely good at and genuinely enjoy. I'm not writing this because I want to escape it. I'm writing this because at some point I started asking what I'd build if I had the chance, and the answer got specific enough that I had to try.
The idea that wouldn't leave me alone
The thing I kept coming back to was this: sales is teachable. Not in the motivational, tips-and-hacks way you see everywhere on LinkedIn. In the engineering sense — there are patterns, frameworks, mental models that the best enterprise sellers use, and most of them aren't written down anywhere in a form that's easy to find or actually useful.
I've sat in procurement reviews, navigated six-figure buying committees, written proposals that went nowhere and ones that closed on the first conversation. I know what works. More importantly, I know why it works. I had no way to share any of that.
That's where Sales Source Code came from. Not a coaching business, not a consultancy — a content and education brand built around the idea that selling is a discipline, and disciplines can be documented and taught. That's the first child company under Nunlimited, the parent business I'm building alongside my day job.
The constraint that changed everything
Here's the honest version of my situation: 4 to 7 hours a week. That's what I have. My day job takes most of my energy — which is fine, but it does set the ceiling. I can't be the person manually writing every blog post, cutting every video, building every email sequence at 10 PM.
When I first thought about building a content business, I nearly gave myself a second job that paid less than minimum wage and ran on fumes. Write a blog post. Record a script. Edit a video. Repeat, somehow, indefinitely, whilst also doing the actual job that pays the mortgage.
The maths didn't work. And I knew it wouldn't work long before I burned out trying.
So I changed the question. Instead of asking "how do I write a blog post tonight?" I started asking "how do I build something that writes blog posts whilst I'm asleep?"
Building the machine
I spent the better part of a year going deep on automation — specifically n8n, a self-hosted workflow tool that lets you wire APIs together into something that actually runs on its own. It wasn't elegant at first. I fought with JSON parsing errors for days. I rewrote prompts I thought were perfect until the output started doing what I wanted. There were evenings I considered abandoning the whole thing.
But then the first workflow ran end-to-end without me touching it.
The result of all that is a ten-workflow system I call Zo.E — Zero-Overhead Engine. It handles content generation, review and approval (via Telegram, which is its own story), publishing, engagement tracking, and weekly analytics. Once it's going, it largely runs without me. My role in the process shifted from writing the content to designing the system that produces it.
That's the shift. From being the worker to being the architect.
What I'm actually building towards
The goal is £250,000 combined annual profit across the Nunlimited portfolio — eventually enough to make full-time employment optional rather than necessary. I want to be clear that I'm not chasing that because I hate my job. I like my job. I'm building an alternative because having one seems like a sensible thing to do, and because the work itself is interesting.
Nunlimited is the parent. Sales Source Code is the first child company — content-led, enterprise sales education, built around the systematic approach that most sales content ignores. There'll be others.
The whole operation runs on 4 to 7 hours a week because that's what I've got. Zo.E makes that viable. Not perfect, not a finished product — but viable.
Why write any of this down
A few reasons.
First, I have no audience yet. Writing about the build is how I start to build one. The people who'd eventually buy what I'm making are exactly the people who'd find the process interesting.
Second, writing it forces clarity. If I can't explain what I'm building and why in plain sentences, I probably don't understand it well enough.
Third — and I'll be honest, this is the smallest reason but it's real — I want a record. If this works, the origin story matters. If it doesn't, I want to know exactly where it went wrong.
That's what this series is. Not a success story. A build log. Some of it will work. Some of it won't. I'll write both.
Ta,
James
Founder | Nunlimited
