Liam O'Leary · Laser Red
About Liam O'Leary
I joined Laser Red when I was 14. It was 2001. I never left.
At a glance
I'm the Managing Director of Laser Red, a digital agency in Lincolnshire. I've been in the business for 25 years and I've run it since 2016. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I like business, I like people, and I like solving problems. I'm at my best when the creative side and the commercial side of a problem line up.
Problem solving
If I had to pick one thing I'm good at, it's this.
Commercial
Sales, pricing, finance. Knowing where the money comes from and where it goes.
Operations
Making a business run smoother. I get a kick out of removing wasted effort.
Marketing
25 years of getting businesses found online, including our own.
People
Building teams, leading them, and keeping good people.
Creative and technical
I can talk brand and design, then talk code and systems. I often pair the two.
What I enjoy: business, efficiency, digital product development, branding and design, innovation, and lately a lot of AI.
Always selling something
I've been entrepreneurial for as long as I can remember. As a teenager I skateboarded, and my friends and I made skate videos. I filmed them, edited them, packaged them up in VHS boxes and sold them to local skaters. We made our own stickers and sold those too.
For about five years I was also a freelance wedding photographer, mostly at weekends alongside the day job. I photographed close to 100 weddings.
Every seat in the building
At Laser Red I've done pretty much every job there is. Data input. Fixing PCs. Designing websites, building them, then marketing them online. All self-taught: HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, domains and hosting. Over the years I've worked with hundreds of clients, and some of them still work with us today.
Doing all of that before I ran the place is the most useful thing about my working life. I know what good work looks like in every part of the agency, and I can usually spot when something isn't right.
Becoming MD, and buying the business
I took over as Managing Director of Laser Red in 2016. My dad, Peter, founded the company in 1995 and built it into a respected Lincolnshire web agency. We were about 10 people then.
In 2019 I bought the business from him. It was one of the hardest conversations I've had and one of the most rewarding. Ten years into the MD role, we're a team of 30+, a £2m agency working with clients across the UK and abroad, with offices in Grimsby and Lincoln.
Acquisitions
Two agencies, both teams still here
Spiral Media, 2018
Our first acquisition. Spiral Media brought extra team capacity and a group of clients we still work with today. We ran it as a separate brand for two years, then fully merged it into Laser Red in 2020.
POP Branding Agency, 2025
Nick Whyatt spent 18 years building POP. We put together a deal that kept what he'd built. POP continues as a sister brand in the Laser Red group, and Nick is now our Creative Client Manager.
Principles
What I believe about running a business
Two things matter most to me.
The business has to make money and be sustainable. Without that, nothing else lasts.
The people in it should be treated fairly, feel valued, and ideally enjoy coming to work.
The business and the people. Those are my two guiding principles.
Beyond that, I care a lot about efficiency, digital products, branding and design, and innovation in technology. AI is where a lot of my spare thinking goes right now. I'm researching it, testing it and using it every day. Alongside Laser Red I also advise and invest in other businesses, including Deploy.dev, a SaaS product we've invested in.
Having known Liam for nearly a decade, I've had the distinct pleasure of watching him build Laser Red into the highly respected, robust marketing agency it is today. It has been a genuine privilege to support that steady, impressive growth over the years in my role as his business coach and agency sector specialist.
Liam is a rare breed of agency leader. He pairs a sophisticated technology-first mindset with a deeply pragmatic, grounded approach to business, ensuring that innovation always serves a real commercial purpose. What truly sets him apart, however, is his empathetic leadership style. Liam uses active listening, always tuning into the nuanced needs of both his team and his clients, and translating those insights into clear, decisive leadership.
He's a great operator and a credit to the Northern agency sector, and I cannot recommend him highly enough to future clients and team members.
The personal bit
I live in Lincolnshire with my wife Kirsty, who's also our Finance Director. We've been together for over 20 years. I drink too much coffee, own a pair of red shoes I wear more than I should, and I can still kickflip.
