My first year in Spain, I sold nothing.

I arrived in 2015 to build the Spanish market for an automatic ABI device — a machine that measures the ankle-brachial index. Fast, reliable, and easy on both the nurse and the patient, which matters more than it sounds: a screening test only prevents anything if it actually gets used. Done routinely, it catches peripheral arterial disease before it becomes an amputation, an infarction or a stroke.

I did what seemed obvious and sold directly. It failed completely. I had no track record here, no relationships, and no reason for anyone to believe me. In a market that runs on trust and on references, I was a foreigner with a brochure.

The clinicians would not talk to me either, and they were not being rude. I was not a doctor, and this is a clinical decision. So I read. Everything published on peripheral arterial disease that I could find, for months.

Then I got ninety minutes with the president of the Sociedad Española de Arteriosclerosis. At the end of it he stood up and said: it was very nice to meet you, Dr Verbič. I told him I was not a doctor. He said that could not be right — there were things in that conversation he had not known himself. I said I just like to know what I am talking about.

I have thought about that moment many times since. It was where I stopped feeling like an outsider selling a box.

I stopped selling direct and built distribution instead. Partners who already had the relationships, the references and the standing I did not have. That decision is why I now have a page on this site written only for distributors — I know exactly what a good principal owes them, because I needed them before they needed me.

And I stopped selling a device. I built the health-economic case instead: what it would cost to equip every centre in a region, set against the nurse hours saved, and the strokes, infarctions and amputations avoided — in patients, in euros, and in quality-adjusted life years. Built from the published evidence on early versus late diagnosis. A public health service does not buy a device. It buys an outcome per euro, and somebody has to do the arithmetic for them.

The ten years at MESI ended in 2025. I spent the year that followed deliberately: applied AI and machine learning at MIT Professional Education, and private equity at Imperial College London.

Both were chosen for a reason. Every SME I talk to is now facing the same two questions — what to automate, and what their capital actually costs them. I did not want to advise anyone on either while guessing. And the private equity work was as much about understanding what your investors are optimising for as anything else; a founder negotiating with a board is better off knowing the other side’s arithmetic.

ScaleCraft is the result. One person, working directly with you, with specialists brought in when a project genuinely needs one. No juniors and no handovers.

There is a method, and it is written down step by step. Knowing what to do next, and how, is not something to improvise inside someone else's company — and writing it down is what makes the work repeatable rather than dependent on my memory of the last engagement. We build the engine together, and your team runs it with me watching before I step away — handover during the work, not after it. A plan that only works while I am in the room is not worth what you would pay for it.