In 2009 I found out what it is like to be described inaccurately in public and to have no obvious way to correct it.
A decade-old dispute that had long since been resolved was being recirculated as though it were current, alongside claims that were simply false. It was not accurate, it was not proportionate, and it was the first thing anyone found when they searched my name.
I want to describe the effect precisely, because it is the part people who have not experienced it tend to underestimate. Nothing dramatic happened. No one confronted me. What happened was a slow accumulation of small revisions in how I was treated: a conversation that cooled, an introduction that never arrived, a counterparty who asked for one more assurance than the deal warranted. Each was individually deniable. Together they described a pattern.
I did what most people do. I hired firms that promised removal. I paid retainers for reports that measured activity rather than outcomes. I was told, more than once, that the situation was under control while the results on the page did not move at all. Some of what I was sold was incompetent. Some of it, I came to understand later, involved methods I would now decline to use.
So in 2013 I started learning it myself. Not as a business; I had no intention of building one. I started because I could not accept that a distorted record was a permanent condition, and that the only available response was to pay someone to reassure me about it.
It took years. I learned how search systems actually assess authority, which is not what the vendors told me. I learned that removal has narrow and specific grounds, and that everything else is a question of proportion. I learned that the durable work looks almost identical to the work of building a legitimate public record, which is why it cannot be rushed. And I learned that the honest answer is frequently unwelcome: that some material will not move, and that saying so is the most valuable thing a practitioner can do.
Eventually my own record reflected the facts. Then people started asking me for help, because word travels among people with this particular problem, and there were very few places to send them where I would have sent someone I cared about.
I formed RMG in 2018 around the things I had wanted and could not find: an assessment I could trust, a method I could see, straight advice, and strict limits on how an engagement is discussed.
I know what it is like to be the client. That is most of what I bring to it.