Why I Started Creating Better and Why You Are Here First

Thank you for being here.

Inspiration comes from strange places, and I have long since stopped trying to predict where it will arrive from next.

Books I probably should have read years ago and conversations that started about one thing and ended somewhere completely different. Industries that solved problems decades ago that we are only just discovering in health and social care, and a meeting that ran an hour too long and produced the one idea that made the whole day worthwhile. I have learned to stay curious enough to notice the good thinking when it shows up, whatever form it takes.

Creating Better grew out of five years of being close to something that was not working as well as it should, and watching that gap between potential and reality grow wider than it needed to be.

The organisations I work with carry real purpose. Care providers, housing associations, local authorities and charities are in the business of people, place and planet, trying to keep people well, keep communities connected and make the best possible use of the resources the planet gives us. That is not a small ambition, and it deserves better than the advice market has sometimes given it.

The technology being developed for these sectors is genuinely remarkable, with talented inventors building passive sensors that can monitor wellbeing without asking anything of the person being monitored, platforms that can spot a change in routine before a crisis develops, and tools that could keep people independent for longer, reduce pressure on stretched services and give families real peace of mind.

And yet somewhere between the drawing board and the door of the people who need it most, something breaks down.

The organisations that could benefit most often do not have the knowledge to navigate what is available, or the budget to get projects delivered properly, and sometimes the solutions being offered are single-path and locked-in, unable to grow with the organisation's needs. And sometimes, too often, the person in the room who understands the technology best also has a product to sell, which means you are not really getting advice at all.

That is not advice. That is a pitch wearing advice's clothes.

Creating Better exists to be something different. Vendor-neutral by design and an alternative perspective in a market that has not always had enough of those, our advice is focused entirely on what is right for you and your unique circumstances, not on what fits a supplier's roadmap, not on what protects someone else's revenue, and not on the kind of committee-approved language that sounds reassuring but says nothing.

I will not be doing this alone, and I would not want to be. I am already building a team of clever people I genuinely enjoy working with, and they will be introduced properly very soon. Beyond the core team, I am reaching out to a wider pool of people I have had the privilege of meeting across these last years, potential collaborators, external contributors and technology providers who share the same values and want to become working partners. These are relationships built on trust that already exists, and that matters to me more than I can easily put into words.

Which brings me to you.

If you are reading this at the very start of the Creating Better journey, thank you. Early followers are a particular kind of people, backing something before it has a track record, before the case studies are written, before anyone else has told them it is safe to be interested. That takes a certain instinct and I do not take it lightly.

Here is a thought to leave you with. Across the sectors we work in, fractional everything has become the norm, with fractional CFOs, fractional CMOs and fractional this and fractional that appearing across organisations of every size, as people get smarter about buying expertise without carrying the full cost of it permanently.

But fractional procurement? Someone genuinely on your side when you are making technology buying decisions, with no product to sell and no commission to collect? That remains surprisingly rare, and it is exactly the gap that Creating Better is here to fill.

A couple of years ago I picked up a book in Fort Worth, Texas called A Cowboy's Guide to Life. It has no business being as wise as it is. But as it puts it: "There's no better friend than a horse that's saddled and ready to go."

The journey starts now, and I am glad you are already here with me.

Harry MacLean is the Founder and Managing Director of Creating Better. He has spent his career making complicated things simpler and broken things better, and he has not finished yet. He has spent years watching health, social care and housing organisations try to navigate a technology market that was not always designed with their interests in mind, and developed some firm opinions, a lot of useful contacts and an apparently incurable interest in sensor technology along the way. He decided to do something about it. This is that something.