My name is Connor Willoughby. I am an independent investor, designer, photographer and publisher from Kent, United Kingdom. My interests have always centred around business, ownership, technology and the decisions that determine why some companies grow while others disappear. This blog is where I intend to document those interests, the decisions I make and the ideas that shape what I build next.
I have never been particularly interested in standing still or following something simply because everybody else is doing it. I prefer to understand how something works, develop my own view and then make a decision based on that understanding. Sometimes that decision will prove correct and sometimes it won’t, but I would rather take responsibility for my own judgement than spend my life borrowing somebody else’s conviction.
Investing has become an important part of that philosophy. When I invest in a company, I am not simply looking at what its valuation might be next week or next month. I want to understand what the company does, why its customers choose it, who is running it, how it competes and whether the business could still be relevant ten or twenty years from now. Ownership changes the way you look at businesses because you suddenly have something attached to the outcome.
My interest in business started long before I built an investment portfolio. My grandad operated his own business supplying bathroom, bedroom and kitchen products, while my nan worked at Walker Crips between 2008 and 2015. As a child, I would occasionally be around the Walker Crips workplace when she collected me after school, and although I obviously wasn’t thinking about markets in any sophisticated way at that age, the environment stayed with me.
There were two very different sides of business around me. One was about building and operating a company, dealing with customers and creating something that could support itself. The other introduced me to the world of investments, companies and ownership. Looking back, I think having both perspectives around me helped create an interest that eventually became much more serious as I got older.
My own working background has also been varied. I spent seven years volunteering with Scope, five years working in hotel hospitality, a summer working as a groundsman and later worked in food manufacturing before leaving that industry in 2023. In 2026, I also completed placements with the Department for Work and Pensions and a mortgage broker, giving me further exposure to organisations operating in very different environments.
Those experiences taught me things that cannot always be learned from a balance sheet. Hospitality teaches you about people and expectations, manufacturing teaches you about processes and consistency, and financial services shows you how significant apparently small decisions can become. Understanding businesses requires more than looking at numbers because ultimately every organisation is built, operated and experienced by people.
Today, I manage my own personal investment portfolio and increasingly focus on building a long-term record of the decisions behind it. ConnorWilloughby.com exists partly because I believe transparency matters. I am comfortable publishing what I have invested, what has performed well and what has performed badly because losses are just as much a part of investing as gains.
I have no interest in creating the appearance of success before the substance exists. If an investment succeeds, I want the record to show it. If a company fails, I want the record to show that too. Over a long enough period, the quality of the decisions should speak louder than presentation, and I would rather build that record gradually than manufacture an image that the numbers cannot support.
Capital also deserves to be treated seriously. Every pound invested somewhere represents a decision not to deploy that same pound somewhere else, which makes allocation important regardless of the amount involved. The principles I use when allocating £100 should not suddenly disappear if one day I am allocating £100,000 or considerably more. Scale changes, but discipline should not.
My interests extend well beyond investing. I build websites, experiment with technology and follow developments in artificial intelligence closely because I am fascinated by the relationship between technology, businesses and capital. I enjoy taking an idea that begins as little more than a domain name or rough concept and turning it into something tangible that people can actually use.
Some projects will become significant and others probably won’t. That doesn’t particularly bother me because the value often comes from building them in the first place. Creating something forces you to solve problems that you would never encounter by simply talking about an idea, and I would rather experiment, make mistakes and improve than spend years waiting for the supposedly perfect moment to begin.
I also prefer to think over much longer periods than the daily noise surrounding markets often encourages. Quarterly earnings, daily share prices and constant headlines all have their place, but they can easily distract from the bigger question of whether a business is becoming stronger or weaker. The companies that interest me most are those with the potential to remain relevant many years from now.
The same principle applies to what I am building personally. What exists today is not supposed to look finished because it isn’t finished. My portfolio will change, websites will evolve, projects will come and go, and my own thinking will inevitably develop as I gain more experience. Capital will be invested, returned and allocated again, and some decisions that look intelligent today may look completely different with hindsight.
That is why I think in terms of decades rather than trying to create the impression that the destination has already been reached. I am far more interested in what can be built over the next ten, twenty or thirty years than creating a temporary impression today. Compounding applies to knowledge, reputation and experience just as much as it applies to capital.
Responsibility is another part of that long-term thinking. My current philanthropic focus is Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, and I have deliberately chosen to concentrate on one organisation rather than filling a page with names for the sake of appearance. If my ability to contribute grows in the future, then I want the scale of that contribution to grow alongside it.
This blog will therefore cover far more than portfolio updates. I intend to write about companies, technology, private businesses, public markets, projects I am developing and decisions I find interesting. There will also be occasions when I disagree strongly with conventional thinking, because independent judgement is fairly pointless if it always reaches exactly the same conclusion as everybody else.
I don’t expect every decision documented here to be correct. That would be unrealistic. What matters to me is being able to explain why a decision was made, take responsibility for the outcome and then learn from whatever happens next. Over time, those decisions create a record that is much harder to manufacture than a carefully constructed image.
I am ambitious about where all of this can eventually lead, and I make no apology for that ambition. At the same time, ambition without execution is simply a statement, and titles without substance do not interest me. I would rather spend the coming years building the portfolio, the projects, the knowledge and the record required to support where I intend to go.
What exists today is considerably smaller than what I intend to build tomorrow. That isn’t something I need to disguise. It is precisely what makes the next chapter worth documenting.
This is only the beginning.
Connor Willoughby