Most digital agencies sell you a team. Erryn Deane built his reputation replacing the mess they left behind.
After twenty-five years spent inside other people’s businesses fixing what their digital suppliers could not, he has put his own name on the door. The business is erryn.io, a Warwickshire-based digital consultancy, and its founding idea is almost rude in its simplicity: one senior pair of hands. No account manager sitting between you and the work.
Ask him why a company would want that and he turns the question around. Why would you want the opposite?
His argument is very straightforward. Big agencies have departments, and departments have seams. The expensive failures nearly always happen at the seams. The SEO team optimises a page the security team breaks later. The design looks beautiful yet converts nobody as the website runs too slowly. Somewhere in the middle sits a client, paying three suppliers that point at each other, while the actual problem goes unowned and unresolved.
Erryn has spent a career watching this happen. His proposition is that a single experienced mind across the whole business leaves nowhere for responsibility to disappear.
Whether that holds depends on the mind. His is unusually broad.
The work spans four areas that rarely live under one roof. Growth, meaning the getting-found part, search and the newer business of being surfaced by AI. Security, the certifications, resilience and the incident response that keep a firm trading when something goes wrong at three in the morning. Systems, the plumbing underneath a business that nobody thinks about until it bursts a pipe. And build, designing and creating the websites, applications and digital experiences customers actually use. Four disciplines. One person.
On paper, that sounds quite ambitious. Until you meet someone who has genuinely spent decades doing it all, and very successfully.
Can one person really be senior in that many things at once? It is the obvious objection, and Erryn meets it head on. The honest answer, he says, is that the breadth is the point, not a dilution of it. Years spent being the entire technical function inside companies turning over a few million, competing against companies many times larger, and beating them, in the sort of place where there is nobody else to escalate to and the output is live. You learn fast when losing is not an option.
He took a business from effectively invisible to outranking its entire sector. Not nudging up the list. Sitting above competitors many hundreds of times its size, in some instances turning over billions with marketing departments in the hundreds. On the other side of that fight, one man. No team behind him, no budget worth the name, just small British companies and someone who refused to accept that size decides the winner. It does not, or not on its own. He proved that more than once, in more than one language, competing and winning across multiple countries at the same time, back when machine translation was still a joke and you had to actually know the market you were selling into.
He is refreshingly unromantic about when it works and when it does not. The approach beats a giant when the smaller firm has something real to sell to a real market. Hand him a genuinely poor product with a tiny, hyper-specific audience and no amount of skill fixes the ceiling on it. That honesty is rarer than talent. Most people selling growth will promise you the moon regardless of what you actually make.
There is a story he tells that captures the through-line. Earlier in his career, working across a group of brands, he produced the product renders and wrote the marketing for a product that did not physically exist yet. No prototype. No unit. Just pictures and words convincing enough that people bought it. Almost a million pounds in orders and enquiries arrived very quickly for a thing still waiting to be built. The lesson stayed with him.
The right combination of visualisation, messaging and commercial understanding can move markets long before engineering catches up, allowing for a true MVP, concept before reality.
The timing of the launch is not accidental. Something has shifted in the digital landscape, and he has strong views about it.
The tools became extraordinary. Anyone can generate something that looks like professional work in an afternoon: a website, a security policy, a marketing campaign, all of it plausible on the surface. Erryn uses those tools daily and says pretending otherwise would be foolish. But he is very blunt about what they cannot do. They cannot tell you when they are wrong.
That judgement comes only from experience, making expensive mistakes, with real money on the line, and having had to fix it before morning. You cannot generate that. You can only earn it through experience.
There is a sharper edge to his thinking here, and it is the part that lingers. Ask an AI to make the case for your plan and it will, beautifully, even when the plan is built on a false premise. It agrees by design, it will feed into a falsehood until the very end. It will walk you down a tidy, well-reasoned path to entirely the wrong place and sound certain the whole way.
What a business actually needs, he argues, is the opposite of a machine that flatters it. Someone who will look hard at what you are sure of, challenge you, and tell you the real problem is somewhere else.
That, more than any individual service, is what he is selling: the uncomfortable second opinion. The person who says the premise is wrong before you spend the budget proving it.
Is a solo consultancy a risk? He would say you have misread where the risk lives. The risk was never the one careful person who owns the outcome, but the four suppliers who own none of it, or the AI that states you are doing a great job.
For a certain kind of business owner, tired of colourful monthly reports that don’t affect the bottom line, the offer of a digital consultancy UK built on senior-only delivery may land as something close to relief. No handoffs. No progress reports mistaken for progress itself. Just one person, accountable, who would rather tell you something true than something comfortable.
The door has his name on it and that appears to be the entire point.