About Lightside

John's career before Lightside covered marketing at IBM, moving into motor finance with First National — six years understanding how consumer lending works from the lender's side — and then into customer-facing commercial lending at Lloyds Bank.

That breadth matters. John has sat in the rooms where lending decisions are made, understands the commercial logic that drives how creditors behave, and knows from experience what they will and won't accept. When he negotiates on behalf of a client, he is not guessing at how the other side thinks.

What has remained constant across all of it is the direct relationship with the people he works with. John is at his best face-to-face with a client — getting to the heart of a complicated situation quickly, and setting out a plan that is both realistic and clearly understood.

John's particular depth is in business debt: assessing viability, negotiating time-to-pay arrangements, and making sure directors understand what insolvency law requires of them before they make decisions they cannot undo.

Outside work, John and his partner run the Black Horse, a village pub — which tells you something about his character. Patience, genuine interest in people, and the ability to stay calm when things get complicated are useful qualities in both roles.

Priti began her career in investment banking, providing debt financing of £5million–£25million to businesses based on cash flow rather than assets as security. She was good at it — but the work felt abstract. The deals were large, the outcomes distant.

She left the corporate world to do something different: work directly with individuals and families facing financial difficulty, at the point where the stakes are most personal. That was over twenty years ago.

Her investment banking background gave her something that proves useful every day: fluency with business cash flows, balance sheets, and profit and loss — and an ease with large financial numbers that means she is rarely fazed by the scale of what a client is facing. But it is twenty years of working directly with creditors, lenders, and trustees that has given her the deeper knowledge of how they think, what they will accept, and where the real room for negotiation lies.

Priti's specialism is the space where business and personal finances collide. When a business is struggling, the consequences rarely stop at the company's door — directors face personal liability, joint debts surface, and the family home can come into the picture. Priti takes a holistic view from the outset: building a strategy that addresses the business situation and the personal financial fallout together, rather than treating them as separate problems to be solved in sequence.

She has appeared on Sky TV and BBC Radio, and has produced a series of online guides helping people understand their options when facing financial difficulty.

Away from work, Priti is a keen scuba diver. She describes the underwater world as quiet, peaceful, and intensely colourful — though you always have to stay alert. Her most memorable dives have been in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

Before joining Lightside, Khurm ran the family construction and property business — overseeing projects of up to twenty flats — before retraining as a mortgage adviser. He was mid-way through that training when Lightside made an approach. He has been here for over fifteen years since.

There is a particular kind of case that tends to find its way to Khurm: situations where alternative lenders are involved, where a business liquidation has triggered personal guarantees, or where creditors' solicitors are communicating aggressively. He handles these with a cool, settled confidence — focused on finding a solution rather than winning an argument.

That last detail is not one Khurm tends to mention himself. It is worth noting.

Outside work, Khurm's focus is his family. Current projects at home include building an outdoor wildlife-friendly pool for cold water dips — following the completion of a commercial kitchen for his wife's business, The Bentley Road Baker.

In 2008, Barry made a deliberate decision: having spent fifteen years running a successful construction business and then becoming the UK's most successful mortgage adviser in 2003/4, he concluded that helping people take on debt they wanted was less useful than helping people get out of debt they didn't. He has been doing the latter ever since.

Barry has built a particular expertise in personal bankruptcy — specifically in cases where clients feared losing their home, and didn't. In one case, a client not only kept their home but their Porsche. In another, a client was discharged nine months early, with two properties that appeared to be in his name both successfully exempt from the bankruptcy estate.

He has also developed a significant specialism in landlord debt, where a property portfolio has become a cash drain rather than an asset worth holding. The work involves identifying which properties are worth keeping, managing the exit from those that are not, and handling any mortgage shortfalls that result. Barry has dealt with a number of cases involving property held overseas, where the complexity — and the anxiety — is considerably greater.

Barry holds a black belt in karate, ran his own dojo, and has judged competitions in the UK and internationally. The discipline and strategic patience that is involved will be familiar to anyone who has worked with him on a difficult case.