About Gavin Cooper

The short version

• 2001 to 2008. Agency account management at Tynan D’Arcy, Tiger Tiger Communications and Carlson Marketing. National campaigns, budgets to a million pounds, measured on sales.
• 2010 to 2016. Parachute Regiment Special Forces Support Group.
• 2012 and 2014. Co-founded Payday Choice, then Forces Money with Alfie Usher. Forces Money is still trading.
• 2018. Set up Fluxify Ltd, the company behind this site. Five years with Express Encapsulation started the same year.
• 2021. Co-founded Claims Bible, an FCA-regulated claims publisher. Rebuilt the site, migrated 305,713 records, and I keep its compliance register.
• Now. Bristol. On my own, with AI writing the code alongside me.

Bristol, 2026.

I’m based in Bristol. I work on my own, and that’s deliberate.

The agency years

I started in 2001 with a BA (Hons) in Marketing from the University of North London and a job as a junior account manager at Tynan D’Arcy, then moved to Tiger Tiger Communications here in Bristol as an account manager, and then to Carlson Marketing as a senior account manager. That’s seven years of agency work for national brands, and for franchise networks including ChipsAway, and it’s where I learned the trade properly. Managing suppliers, managing budgets, managing the client, and being the one who had to make sure the thing actually happened.

The two pieces of work from that time I’d still put on the table are an in-store campaign for the Ask and Zizzi restaurant chains at Tiger Tiger, which delivered an 11% sales uplift, and a national, multi-channel promotional campaign for Anchor butter at Carlson, which had a budget of a million pounds and delivered 8%. I mention them because they were measured against sales rather than clicks, which is how I still think marketing should be measured, and because it’s useful to know that the person rebuilding your website has run something at that scale.

The army

From 2010 to 2016 I served with the Parachute Regiment Special Forces Support Group. I’m not going to make much of it here because it’s not what you’d be hiring me for. But it’s where I learned to plan properly, brief clearly, and stay calm when the plan meets reality, and clients notice those things even when they can’t name them. It’s also why the Forces community trusts me, which matters for some of the work I do now.

The first ventures

While I was serving, in 2012, I co-founded Payday Choice, an independent payday loan comparison site. The sector was a mess and nobody was helping people compare what they were being offered. By 2014 it had enough of a profile that I was told it had been raised in Parliament by an MP who worked on the payday loans issue, and that same week the Competition and Markets Authority published its findings on the market and said what it needed was an independent price comparison website, which was a strange thing to read when you’d already built one. It’s long gone now. It was my first business and I learned most of what I know about running a website from it.

Then in 2014, still serving, I set up Forces Money with Alfie Usher, who I’d served alongside. It’s a tax rebate business for serving and former forces personnel, who are owed money by HMRC far more often than they realise, and it started trading in 2015. I was a founding director. It’s still going, and it’s how Alfie and I ended up working together on everything since.

Doing it myself

I set up Fluxify in April 2018 to do marketing for owner-managed businesses. It’s still the company behind this site, and its name is in the footer. What took me a while to work out is that the thing clients were actually buying was me, and that a company name was getting in the way of that. So the site has my name on it.

The work from those years is on the case studies pages. The one I’d point you to first is Express Encapsulation, a Bristol trade laminator I worked with for five years. I did everything for them, from the brand and the website to the router and the phones, and in April 2020 the online shop I’d built them to sell laminating film got repurposed to sell PPE and kept the business alive through lockdown. That’s the job in one story. Not one thing done well, but all of it done by one person who understood how the pieces fit.

Claims Bible

In 2021 Alfie and I started Claims Bible. It’s a claims publisher that helps people work out whether they’ve got a compensation claim worth making, and it operates under an FCA authorisation, which means every page on it is a financial promotion and every form on it has to capture consent properly.

It’s where the technical side of what I do got serious, because there was nobody else to do it. I wrote most of the content. I rebuilt the site from WordPress into a custom build that generates nearly seven hundred pages and refuses to deploy if its own audit fails. I migrated three hundred thousand records out of four databases nobody trusted. And I keep the compliance register, which is a numbered list of every question anyone’s ever raised about whether something on the site is allowed, with the answer and where the answer came from. Those three pieces of work each have their own page.

How I work now

On my own, and with AI. I specify the work, make the decisions, test everything and own the result, and the code is written alongside Claude. I say that plainly because it’s true and because it’s the honest answer to a question you’d ask anyway. It doesn’t make the judgement part smaller. If anything it makes it the whole job. Somebody still has to know what to build, what not to build, and how to tell when something’s wrong before it ships, and that’s what you’d be paying for.

I’m also building something new for franchise networks, whose individual locations tend to be invisible in their own towns while the brand pays for ads on the searches they should own for free. That’s early, and I’ll write about it properly when there’s a result to report.

Not everything I build gets launched straight away. I built XF3 Method, a coaching product for CrossFit gyms. The site’s up and the system behind it works, but it’s paused, because getting it to market properly needs more investment and more content than made sense at the time. I’d rather say that plainly than pretend it’s a business.

Outside work

I’ve got a daughter, I train at a CrossFit gym, and I walk. I used to do endurance events for charity until my ankle put a stop to it, including the Bristol Half Marathon in twenty-five kilos of kit for Penny Brohn Cancer Care and a hundred-kilometre march for wounded veterans, and I still support those causes in other ways. I care more than is probably reasonable about design.

Who should get in touch

If you run an established business and the marketing, the website and the systems have all grown up separately and don’t talk to each other, that’s the job I’m built for. If you’re a law firm, a claims business or a financial firm and you need marketing done by someone who understands the rules you’re working under, that’s the other one.

Either way, the easiest thing is to get in touch and tell me what’s not working.