About — Sticklebrick

Sticklebrick robots threading glowing blue ribbon-cables between operational systems — the connective AI conversation.

Sticklebrick is founded and led by operators with over thirty years each of running real businesses. We have managed fleets, run distribution, dispatched engineers, posted invoices, closed months, defended margin in front of a board, and lived through three previous technology cycles. We started a consultancy because the AI shift is too important to leave to platform vendors.

Our position

A consultancy, built from the operator’s side of the desk.

Most AI consultancies are staffed by people who have never run a depot at 6:30am, never defended a margin at a quarterly board, never been the person responsible when an SLA breached. We have.

We sit alongside Fleetgenie and Bluepoppy Vehicle Management, our sister companies — a decade of pulling cost, miles and carbon out of UK operational fleets. Sticklebrick is the consultancy that brings that operator know-how to the AI adoption work.

Trust is the only thing that matters when you are putting the future of your business in the hands of a technology you don’t yet fully understand.

That is the whole conviction. Everything below is how we earn it.

— Trust Three things at once

Operators. Independent. Patient.

T—01

Operators

Operators, not platform vendors.

We have run the kind of business you run. Between the founding team, we have lived inside fleet, distribution, field service and SME operations — on the operations side, not the IT side. The advice you get is grounded in thirty years each of running real businesses, not in a research lab.

We know what an approved buying list looks like, what a trade counter sounds like at half past seven in the morning, and why the same product is on hand in two depots but missing in the one that needs it. That experience is the moat.

T—02

Independent

Independent of any single AI partner.

We are not selling you our own model or our own software. We use whichever AI partner is right for your problem — and we will tell you when AI is the wrong answer altogether.

Our economics are not tied to anyone’s vendor partnership programme. If the right answer is a small open-source model on your own VPC, we say so. If the right answer is no AI at all, we say that too.

T—03

Patient

Patient enough to move at your speed.

We move at the speed your business can absorb. We do not promise to transform you in ninety days. We promise to leave you better off than we found you, with a plan you can defend.

A good consultancy makes itself increasingly unnecessary. We deliver, we train, we hand it back. We do not occupy your business indefinitely. We do not bill for hours that aren’t earning their keep.

— Partners Sister companies

Where the operator know-how comes from.

Fleetgenie

Fleet management for operational businesses

A decade of pulling cost, miles and carbon out of UK operational fleets — delivery vans, engineer vans, depot runs and trunking. Telematics, route optimisation, driver behaviour, lease management. The operator wedge that feeds Sticklebrick’s consultancy with real-world ground truth.

10–18% lower fleet running cost · 12–22% lower emissions

Bluepoppy Vehicle Management

Vehicle leasing and lifecycle management

Independent leasing broker and lifecycle partner to UK SMEs and contractors. Twenty years inside the procurement, finance and operations conversations that decide what gets on a van and how much it costs to keep it there.

UK-wide · 2,400+ vehicles under management

— What we are not

Straight talk

A few things we don’t do. And won’t.

N—01

We don’t sell you a platform.

Sticklebrick has no software product. We are paid for the consulting work, not for ongoing licence fees on something we built.

N—02

We don’t ask you to replace your ERP, your WMS or your CAFM.

We extend them. If one of those tools is the wrong tool for the job that’s a different conversation — and not one we’ll lead with.

N—03

We don’t train AI on your data.

Customer data is never used to train any model, ours or a partner’s. We work with trusted AI partners under zero-retention contracts as a matter of course.

N—04

We don’t do six-month "discovery" projects.

If we can’t show value inside the first eight weeks on a pilot scope — one workflow, one depot, one contract — we’ll tell you. We’d rather miss a deal than pad an engagement.

N—05

We don’t lock you in.

We use trusted AI partners on standard contracts you sign directly. When we hand over, you own the integration, the runbooks, the relationships. We are on call for the next brick — not in occupation of your business.

— Team Small. Senior. Hands-on.

The people in the room.

PW

Paul Watts-Barnes

Founder · Operator · 30+ yrs

Twenty-plus years running fleet and operational businesses. Founder of Bluepoppy Vehicle Management. Leads the AI adoption work end-to-end.

CF

Co-founder

Founder · Operator · 30+ yrs

A career inside UK operational businesses on the commercial and operations sides. Leads partner relationships and engagement scoping.

DR

Head of Integrations

Engineering lead

A decade of CAFM, ERP and WMS integration work for tier-one UK operators. Leads the technical side of every engagement.

SK

Applied AI

Practice lead

Production ML practitioner. Obsessed with the gap between a model that looks good in the demo and one that earns its keep on a Tuesday.

— Next Step

We add the AI bricks. You keep the building.

Twenty minutes. No deck. We’ll tell you straight whether we can help.

Book a 20-minute call → Start the free audit

Founded by operators.